Dear Editor,

It is ironic that the town council which served in the 2019 to 2023 quadrennium should be censured by the auditors for illegally giving tax payers money to one of their number. As many of them were active, both through social media and the printed press in attempting to blacken the previous administration, 2015 to 2018 with unsubstantiated and untrue statements alleging financial impropriety.

I have lost count of the number of complaints lodged against me to the monitoring officer, none of which were upheld and other colleagues suffered similarly. Who could forget the picture of aspiring councillors brandishing placards with “Where has all the money gone” when the money was safely in the town council’s bank account and the large effigy of a ten pound note with my picture instead of the Queen’s – the inference was obvious.

At that time I was interviewed by the police on trumped up charges, brought by the same group. This attracted prominent attention from the local press, (although much less attention when no charges were brought).

When two of our colleagues defected to the opposition the remaining Conservative Councillors decided not to stand for re-election.

So an “Independent” council was elected unopposed and the rest is history. No black holes were found in the Council’s finances when the new administration took charge, they had achieved their goal without the inconvenience of a democratic vote.

Yours faithfully,

Jean Parbrook

Minehead

Dear Editor,

Earlier today I had the necessary work done to my phone system to make my landline ready for the big switch off of landlines served by copper cable, not fibre, on January 1, 2027.

It all began with my provider sending me an email asking me to contact them and arrange a time and date when this work could be done, as all providers are required to do. All the benefits were explained. It was emphasised that I was not obliged to do anything, apart from be here when the work is carried out. I could choose to pay for an engineer to come and install the new router and phone adapters for me, but there is the option of doing it yourself if you so wish. The required parts were delivered in plenty of time. Then, 2 days before this was all due to happen, I had an email purporting to come from Openreach saying their engineer would be with me the following day i.e. the day before the change was scheduled to take place. This had not been mentioned to me in any earlier dealings with my service provider. I was going out almost immediately after reading this email and would be away from home until the evening before the planned switch-over. I found time to contact Openreach via their website to cancel their engineer's visit and did not take up the offer to re-schedule a visit straight away.

How fortunate that I had not acted on the email from 'Openreach'. I found the video in their email about having to have work done which entailed drilling through a wall in the property and installing some sort of box, and lots of other intrusive work quite worrying. It turned out that this is absolutely not true and totally unnecessary. When the engineer came to alter my system, he was able to do it without any further work. He simply installed the new router and put in the adapters.

I hope that reading this letter will prevent anyone from being conned by unscrupulous rogues.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Raybould

Dear Editor,

I totally agree with Isabel Ward, what is the point of building thousands of new houses if there are no amenities to go with them? I applaud the idea of building a doctor’s surgery at Cades Farm, but who is going to staff it? It apparently costs in the region of £230,000 to train a doctor, and what young person wants to start life saddled with that amount of debt?

The same with schools, new Primaries are being built, but what happens then? I imagine the imposing of Vat on private schools has meant the parents who might have considered private education now will apply to already crowded State schools.

Lets bring back into use the thousand of houses/ flats left empty (I know of several) before further despoiling our countryside by building more.

Sincerely,

Anne Sparkes

As if the big mistakes already made cutting pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, capping child benefit payments above two kids, cutting PIP payments for the disabled, and cutting international aid to desperately poor people are not enough, we now witness something even more stupid from this 180-seat majority Labour government: the continuation and expansion of nuclear power stations, nuclear powered submarines and nuclear bombs. All costing hundreds of billions of our public funds and likely causing a war-derived Armageddon end to all life on Earth in the next decade or so.

Massive funds so much better spent on shoring-up and expanding so many of our presently collapsed national and local government public services, all essential to support.ordinary people’s daily mental, social, and physical well-being, rather than showing-off our world top-table prestige. Surely our local witness in the disastrous building of Hinkley C nuclear power station, with all its hopeless overruns on cost and on timing, plus still the unproven very costly 25,000-year project to eventually look after all its dangerous high-level radioactive waste in an underground geological disposal facility?

With all this in mind, how on earth can there be anything but despair in Labour’s latest Spending Review’s another great waste of public funds in set-up financing of yet another new nuclear power station.

Yours,

Alan Debenham

Taunton