YP Letters: Powerhouse grounded by cuts in flights

The British Airways decision to reduce the number of flights from Heathrow to Leeds Bradford has caused dismay.

NOTHING illustrates the lowering of expectations for the Northern Powerhouse and Yorkshire devolution in promoting jobs and investment than the decision of British Airways to reduce the number of weekly flights from Leeds Bradford Airport to Heathrow from 20 to 10 in each direction.

If this isn’t another “kick in the teeth” in transport terms for Yorkshire’s leading cities, I don’t know what is.

Toll of the deadly drivers

From: Allan Ramsay, Radcliffe Moor Road, Radcliffe.

With the report that NHS surgeons performed 43,000 operations to pull out children’s rotten teeth, at a cost of £36m, this undoubtedly needs a quick fix.

But, there’s a far bigger threat to children’s health: over one million suffer from asthma and in 2016, asthma claimed the lives of 13 children in England and Wales. The NHS spends around £1bn a year treating asthma, and exhaust fumes from motor vehicles undoubtedly play a part.

Also, when exhaust fumes are ‘loaded’ with carcinogens; just as drinks ‘loaded’ with sugar cause tooth decay, how can exhaust fumes not cause cancer?

Although all drivers can’t be labelled ‘rotten’, those that drive at excessive and inappropriate speeds; under the influence of drink or drugs, and use mobile phones, are most certainly ‘rotten’. These ‘bad apples’ spoil the NHS, if not planet Earth!

According to the Department for Transport: between July and September last year 650 children were killed or severely injured, 118 more than in the same three months in 2015.

Seven children are killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads every day, at an annual cost of £547m.

Road collisions and crashes can cause life-changing injuries including loss of limbs, spinal injuries and head injuries. Accordingly, treating ‘rotten’ drivers is surely a much bigger priority than treating rotten teeth.

Goodwill goes to waste

From: Elaine Fretwell-Munns, Kirkbymoorside.

Following on from my previous correspondence regarding the lack of recycling facilities for food waste and plastics, nearly two years on I see no change.

I am still having to put my food waste into the general waste which inevitably goes to landfill, though Ryedale council assured me they were in the process of providing this facility to domestic properties.

Having listened with interest to the war on single-use plastic, I decided to have a doorstep milk delivery instead of buying my milk in plastic bottles. However after a lengthy search I am informed that there are no providers in my area that deliver to the door. So all my good intentions fail.

As a consumer who cares deeply about the environment, I am increasingly frustrated at the lack of recycling facilities for food waste and plastic, and now I can’t even get a bottle of milk delivered!

Equal rights for England

From: J Patrick, Wakefield Road, Pontefract.

Only when England has equal democratic rights with the rest of Britain will we be able to solve the problem which is NHS England.

The British Government diverts funds readily to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, yet starves England of resources from health to highways.

Ultimately, it is English taxpayers who fund the  British Isles, but who are then the last in the queue for health and social care benefits, and whose infrastructure is the worst in Britain.

Why no local supplier?

From: John Hall, Baildon, Shipley.

I have just received a leaflet offering various water-saving devices from an address in Slough in the prosperous  South with my latest bill from Yorkshire Water.

Why isn’t the private water monopoly using a supplier in a nearer-to-home, less prosperous, part of Yorkshire?

This would have the advantage of providing local employment and reducing the distance such items have to be transported.

Obesity not all down to diet

From: Aled Jones, Southcliffe Road, Bridlington.

The latest hare-brained idea is the proposal to ban kids from eating chocolate bars in tough new rules to halt the so-called obesity crisis. It is ludicrous.

It took me 30 years to  rise above 13 stone and I  have been eating copious amounts of chocolate every day since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Surely, obesity is the unfortunate result of our genes and has nothing at all  to do with diet?

It is just another example of further attempts by the government to intervene in  how the nation’s families live their lives.