Double yellow lines

Is there an exemption from this area that only parking inspectors are aware of ?

David

Sheffield

Restoring faith

Many thanks to the honest individual who handed in my handbag with the contents untouched which I had lost outside Penistone Road Home Bargains on the morning of November 14.

It helps to restore faith in human nature.

June Sheridan

S10

Rising to the challenge

Your columnist Ellen Beardmore challenged readers to write to your letters page regarding her opinion piece in your sister paper The Sheffield Telegraph last week.

I am not sure if the challenge was regarding street cleaning, the subject of her article, or her ignorance of local government finance and her lack of awareness of what has been happening in Sheffield for seven years. Ellen’s column is more is a case of blaming the messenger.

Whether it be street cleaning, parks or social care the effects of seven years of “austerity” are clearly being seen across the city and Ellen’s comment “ What is the point of paying council tax if we can’t even have clean streets?” is clearly wrong.

It should be “What is the point of paying income tax to the Government if we can’t keep the streets clean” as it is that portion of local government finance, passed from central government, that has been disappearing and will have been fully cut by 2020.

The Revenue Support Grant is money raised by Government through taxation and passed on to local government. Since 2010 £400 million will have been removed from Sheffield City Council’s Revenue Support Grant, a total of more than £1.5 billion removed from the Sheffield economy.

The Conservative Government will reduce it again this year by around £50 million alongside the £350m removed by the previous Conservative Government and its Liberal Democrat allies.

By 2020 the Revenue Support Grant or 50 per cent of the Sheffield City Council budget will have gone and the effect has been devastating and now beyond hiding.

Along with the 2,000 jobs that have gone from the council, cuts have been made to all the important services a civilised city should have –education, housing, services for the old and vulnerable as well as libraries , culture and sport.

The level of funding in 2020 will be needed merely to maintain the core services of social care and children’s services and very little else.

Alongside the local government cuts, Sheffield sees its hospitals in deficit and threats of closure to the Hallamshire minor injuries unit and other facilities under the Government’s so-called Sustainability and Transformation Plans.

Cuts in direct funding to schools will be coming to a school near you this year as will the dreaded Universal Credit that will plunge poor families into even deeper poverty. A Victorian bedfellow for the iniquitous “bedroom tax” and changes to levying council tax on the poorest.

Ellen’s ironic comment on “ever increasing council tax” is far from the truth as for a number of years it was politically fashionable to levy 0 per cent increases to council tax and all this did was make the funding gap wider and services poorer. The unfair nature of the council tax itself has seen the heaviest burdenof taxation falling on the poorest and it is surely a system in need of reform.

Far from challenging the readers I feel the Telegraph, and the council itself, need to be the ones challenged.

They are the ones far better placed to describe the damage being done to the city and far better to organise a campaign to oppose the destructive cuts levied on the services we need and deserve.

The great economist John Galbraith once described the United States as “ private affluence alongside public squalor” and this is now beginning to resemble Sheffield and other major cities of the North.

On the wider political front the policy of “austerity” is now being seen as a great economic mistake, as great as it was in the 1930s and in the 1980s and we should be fighting for a new economic strategy that can create and share its wealth more equally and provide a civilised society for all.

Dave Berry

Walkley

The feral pigeons

I hate to be seen to be ‘homing in’ on the correspondence of a lady I have a lot of respect for, Susan Richardson, regarding pigeons but can we expect a letter from Dave Allen on the subject?

Remember ,I only referred to feral pigeons, collared doves coo to me every morning and I regard them as a delight.

Ron Clayton

Unruly pupils

I was shocked to read on the letters page recently about the unruly pupils.

It is many years since I was at school, 80 to be precise, and good behaviour was taught in and out of school, also at home.

Some years ago I wrote a few lines and sent them to a friend from school on her 80th birthday and I am sending them to you, showing the difference between now and then:

How very long ago it is, yet it seems like yesterday,

We all went on our way to school

Where 3 R’s were the Golden Rule.

If you were late, it was the cane!

You tried not to be late again,

But sprinkled among those basic things

Were courtesy, good manners too.

Little things you didn’t forget,

Which have always stood by you.

And when school days were finished

And friends all went their way,

You never thought you’d meet again,

But you did, another day.

How good it was reminisce

On all those days now gone,

When hours all seemed sunny ones

And days were full of fun.

But time goes on and we’ve grown old,

We can’t escape the truth,

But never will our memories fade

Of those Golden Days of Youth.

Dorothy Canning

S10

Keep dogs on leads

The latest thing seems to be dog walkers walking their dog without a lead on roads, even main roads.

This is a danger for traffic, dogs that are on a lead, or even small children walking by.

It is something that wants looking into, it’s a tragedy waiting to happen.

Brenda Wilkinson

Lodge Moor, S10

Dog attack solution

The answer is muzzles to fit all dogs, small or large.

It worked in the 1950s when there was a risk of rabies, so why not now?

Mr D Poulton

by email