Many thanks to Agency

WE wanted to write a public letter to the Hereford Times thanking the Environment Agency for the work that was done in previous years which meant that this year Hereford was not flooded.

Yes, the river broke its banks and yes, the Bishops Meadows flooded, but that is what the flood plains are for.

We live on the banks of the river in Greyfriars Avenue and watched the river roaring past but always at a safe distance.

We’d also like to thank the many friends who offered our family a home for “when the river comes in”.

I am not sure what work was done when Asda was built, but it seems to have worked.

Also, thanks to the Environment Agency for their brilliant flood alert system allowing me to sleep at night knowing the predicted river height was within safe limits.

POLLY AND ROGER ERNEST Greyfriars Avenue, Hereford

A plea for drain help

I AM writing in the desperate hope that something will be done about the surface water flooding at Dene Pool Cottage and Seven Site playing fields in Kingstone.

Surface water flooding has been a problem at Dene Pool and Seven Site for many years, ever since the ditch at the back of Seven Site was replaced by an underground pipe, which is now seriously blocked.

The catchment pool at Whitehouse Farm was subsequently filled in, removing a large surface water catchment area. The Hops building site (30 houses) was built on this area, with all surface water being brought to inadequate road drainage past Dene Pool Cottages to Seven Site.

A drain connection from Cotton’s Meadow housing site, opposite Bevan’s site entrance, in severe rain conditions results in surface water from Cotton’s Meadow backing up, adding to the problems for Dene Pool and Seven Site.

Surface water is penetrating soakways from septic tanks in the Dene Pool area, contaminating flooding surface water to all flooded areas.

The blockage was reported by me two years ago but nothing was done.

The two new proposed developments of nearly 200 houses surrounding the Dene Pool and Seven Site area will seriously add to the problem.

I am a 66-year-old resident at the Dene Pool Cottages and have already spent two nights outside my house until 4am with a three-gallon bucket and a small submersible pump behind a wall of sandbags, trying to keep surface water out of my house.

I am writing in the desperate hope that someone with the necessary authority can help to clear the blocked drain.

S GREVES Kingstone, Hereford

County roads in poor state

I AM writing to comment on the standard of Herefordshire’s road maintenance. I live in Cusop on the English/Welsh border and spend most of my week travelling in Powys, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire.

I very rarely venture into Herefordshire, so I notice the standard of the road surface more than the everyday user. I have one question for Herefordshire Council: What are you doing with our council tax?

Because it is not being spent on the roads.

My council tax in Herefordshire is approximately 25% higher than in Powys. Powys, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire roads are in 100% better condition than Herefordshire’s.

I had occasion to go into Hereford on February 17 and the state of the roads was downright dangerous, with potholes full of water so you could not tell how deep they were.

Blocked drains, flooded gullies, the list is endless.

When I travel in Wales I see roads being resurfaced nearly every week. Not tarred and chipped or patched, but completely resurfaced.

Come on, Herefordshire, get your act together and give us the council tax-payer some decent roads for the council tax we are paying.

J D BURGESS Cusop, Hay on Wye

If job’s worth doing...

MY complaint is about the quality of road repairs. I have seen repairs carried out on nearby roads, only for the tarmac to be washed out within a few days.

Having watched the teams, they just seem to chuck cold lay bitumen into a hole, give it a quick roll and leave. Whatever happened to using a blow torch to dry the hole, clean it out, seal the edges with liquid bitumen and then properly roll the bitumen?

It can’t make sense to keep coming back to repair a hole; why not do it once and do it properly?

Who quality-assures these repairs?

I know that there is little money about for road repair, but just relying on Balfour Beatty stating that they have repaired X hundred holes in a month does not mean that the job has been done well.

Why not repair fewer holes in a given period, but do it properly and make it last; that must make more economic sense, surely?

NICK LONGMAN Dorstone

They’re not fit to govern

THE other day a friend said to me: “David Cameron will be remembered for two things: potholes and the closing of public lavatories.” What a damning indictment and what a soul- destroying legacy.

It would seem that the Government cares nothing about exposing the public to the ever-increasing danger of untreated roads. And one is forever hearing about the closure of public lavatories.

All in all, the dire severity of this alarming situation beggars belief; we are virtually on a war footing.

The perpetual and nauseating handing down of futile excuses from one authority to another confirms that the Government has lost control and is no longer fit to govern.

Urgent action is required to restore some form of sanity to our tortured land.

ROBIN GEORGE Bredenbury, Bromyard

Don’t blame supermarket

IN his recent letter, Readers’ Times , February 13, Pete Blench concluded with the words: “The central shopping precincts of our Herefordshire market towns define them.” What does that mean in the case of Leominster?

Unfortunately, it means too many shops that close not long after lunch, and far too many cases of decaying or unpainted woodwork, crumbling masonry, and rooftop gutters overflowing with greenery.

In a similar vein, both the town and the county council have failed to do their part in making the shopping experience one to enjoy. Try finding a level pavement or an even stretch of road in the central precinct.

Watch as shoppers try to negotiate their way across the uneven surfaces, or as drivers weave their way around ironworks that the sunken roadways have exposed.

Decay on this scale doesn’t just happen. It takes years of indifference.

I want Leominster to thrive, but it isn’t a new supermarket that will be the death knell of the town centre; its retailers, their landlords perhaps, and the councils are doing it between them.

GRAHAM CARPENTER Oldfields Close, Leominster

Academy’s fine progress

YOUR Hereford Academy comments (Hereford Times, February 13) rightly draws attention to the Academy’s value-added score.

Value added compares individual pupils’ performance between KS2 and KS4 with that for pupils nationally who were of the same level of ability at the end of KS2. Based around 1,000, the VA score indicates the value the school has added on average for its pupils. For 2013 Hereford Academy’s score was 1029.4.

It is also worth noting its 2011-13 progress in GCSE, including English and maths.

CHRISTOPHER WHITMEY Fownhope, Hereford

NHS safe in their hands?

I WRITE in support of our National Health Service.

From the Conservative manifesto of 2010 one would think their promises would give no room for concern. It would seem they actually had other plans in mind.

Readers’ Times My recent experience of being referred to the musculoskeletal clinic, which has a four-month waiting list yet is only funded as an NHS service on a one-day-a- week-basis, leaves a lot to be desired.

ROY LITTLE

Reckless spending

RECENTLY I stood up in council and tried to prick the conscience of those in influence in this Tory administration, but as usual it fell upon deaf ears.

This cabinet system is simply not serving the people of Herefordshire, and a handful of members, just six out of 58 elected members, make all the decisions, usually in private session and then from their confidence of invincibility command the rest of their group to follow their lead.

Below is part of my speech: “We are told over and over again that all councils are in the same boat.

That simply is not true.

Quite apart from the waste and loss already identified, our general reserves have been plundered over the last two administrations.

This raid on the reserves has been necessary to balance failings in previous budgets and to bolster unpopular and ill-advised vanity projects.

Colleagues, of all persuasions, this is not just opposition rhetoric; speak to any number of ordinary people and you will discover there is huge disquiet about how council spends its money.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you about this last year, and the year before, when It’s Our County voted against budget proposals which we knew were unachievable and hence damaging to those reserves.

Now, general reserves struggle even on paper to meet the legal minimum requirement of 3% of our revenue – even as that revenue continues to decline.

Look no further than across the boundary to Worcestershire. There, a local authority with a population four times larger than ours, has reserves 40 times larger.

Yes, we came off worse out of the split of Hereford and Worcester, but since then what have we done to make the most of what we were allocated in 1998?

You will remember the parable of the ‘talents’, those biblical bags of money: we haven’t grown our talent as the wise recipients did, we haven’t even buried it as the foolish one did – we’ve just squandered ours to keep going.

I am reminded that for a decade or more we were constantly warned that unwise and prolific overspending on our credit cards and loans would bring about personal disaster and that we would have to account for it. We now see the consequences of that warning.

The awful thing about this present dilemma, and the very thing that causes me so much anxiety, is that there is no real accountability for those who are reckless with spending public money.

This time last year we said “the cupboard is bare”.

This year, we’ll be having to sell the cupboard.

And colleagues, it’s not our cupboard to sell.”

CHARLES NICHOLLS Member, Three Elms Ward

Dredge our waterways

I WAS absolutely flabbergasted to read that the Environment Agency was auctioning off dredging equipment and tug boats at Brightwells and I was pleased to read in the Hereford Times that the auction items had been withdrawn.

I am a keen boater and have for many years joked about the fact that the River Wye is a navigation for boats up to Hay on Wye, because there is very little evidence of maintenance being done on the Wye or its tributaries such as the Lugg and Arrow.

My son and his partner have fields that border the Lugg at Stoke Prior and a couple of years ago we took a boat ride up to the weir just south of Brightwells.

When you get down to the waterway, the obstacles are huge, simple riverside access is non-existent.

Then you get road cones, shopping trolleys and no end of fallen trees that block the flow of the river.

All this debris will have now blocked the bridges and choked the water flow, which, then with nowhere to go, floods the farmers’ land, rendering it useless for months on end.

The rivers of Herefordshire are a valuable asset to tourism and should be made available for canoeing and boating activities. If you look back through the history books you will come across the Wye Trow which was the lorry of Herefordshire’s waterways and was an invaluable tool to bring fresh goods to Hereford and transport Herefordshire goods to Bristol for distribution worldwide.

Our only Wye Trow stands idle at Gloucester docks instead of being so proudly displayed as it was for the Queen’s Jubilee parade of water craft, back at its home city of Hereford.

But then that would mean that our Environment Agency would have to dredge the river to get it to Hereford and provide a mooring.

Unfortunately for the Environment Agency, the ‘desk jockeys’ take the lion’s share of the funding and then make uninformed guesses that sub-contractors will pick up their slack and do the job they are supposed to do.

Of course, then when something goes wrong like selling off tools of the trade that could so easily be donated to Somerset for instance, the ‘desk jockey’ defends his/her five-figure staff job by blaming the contractors.

In short, what is needed is sympathetic conservation of the river banks, but by dredging the river and removing fallen trees you will get sufficient water flow to alleviate flooding.

The Environment Agency spokeswoman Serena Balsdon actually answered why the agency does need boats to dredge, by stating that “the dredging boats were used to gain access to the river where road access was not possible.” That doesn’t surprise me, as it’s rivers she is working on and not highways.

On another note, I cannot thank the guys at the Kingsland Highways depot enough for the 25 sand bags they loaded into my car so that I could save my son’s house from flooding in Stoke Prior. They were very helpful and a credit to Herefordshire.

STEVE LLOYD Leominster

BMX project is on track

I WOULD like to reply to Mr Ree’s letter about the BMX track, Hereford Times, February 27.

After a successful event in September, I encouraged a regular user of the BMX track to apply for a start-up grant from Hereford City Council to form the BMX club.

An independent club run by local people opens up the possibility of grant funding from outside organisations.

It is important that groups are genuinely community- led to have a chance of success. This happened in December and I have been working with the group and Herefordshire council officers on a launch event to be staged on April 6.

We are planning a cycle ride around the ward finishing at the BMX track where a community BBQ will celebrate their achievements, along with a host of other activities.

Councillor Sue Boulter and I, as the two parish councillors for St Nicholas, are also helping the club secure a storage facility to be sited at the track .

We are also working on a plan to upgrade the play facilities at the park.

So far from doing nothing, I would like to ensure residents I am continually busy working on community projects. The BMX track is a great facility – let’s all get behind it!

Sharon Michael Greenland Road Leominster

Really ticked off by tickets

I WAS appalled to read in the Hereford Times (February 27) that two disabled pensioners have been issued with a parking ticket despite using their blue badge.

I agree that this change is not apparent.

lthough there are some new signs up in the car park, there is nothing to alert blue badge holders of any change of policy.

Many disabled customers with severe mobility issues would find that walking to a ticket machine and back to the car to display a ticket to be an unnecessary chore.

The reasoning that the new policy is ‘to make the car park available to genuine shoppers’ is flawed. The premise that disabled people would leave their car in Morrisons and WALK elsewhere to shop is ludicrous.

MALCOLM WHYATT Nimrod Drive, Hereford

Birthday do raised £300

MAY I through your columns thank family, friends, neighbours and work colleagues who came to Chris Ruffe’s 60th birthday bash recently.

A thoroughly enjoyable evening was had by all and a magnificent £300 was raised.

The sum will be split between Cancer Research and the Midlands Air Ambulance.

Chris Ruffe Tupsley, Hereford.