SIR – In your two reports of the recent Worcester City Football Club AGM (Worcester News, 30th January), club director Mr Jeremy Pitt was reported as saying that “without Perdiswell there is no club, and that’s the bottom line”. 
Such an opinion sits better with the petulance of a spoilt child than someone seeking to help to pull the club out of a mess of the making of many predecessors. A new ground should be one we can all support, not one tainted with controversy.
Suffice it to say that St George’s Lane was lost due to the club living above its means. £600,000 of the capital receipt for the sale of the stadium was lost on the decision to be released from a contract to build a new stadium off Nunnery Way. No doubt, there was an air of certainty about the Nunnery Way decision which then proved to be misplaced and unprotected.
The AGM also reported that “City received £3.1 million for the sale of St George’s Lane, but they have now been left with a balance of only about £650,000” and that “the club is also expected to lose a further £120,000” in the current financial year.
In the long term, it could be worth the club dropping down a couple of divisions and rebuilding from there while searching for a new site before the current balance drops to zero. To continue in the National League North without a stadium or a generous sponsor is asking too much of both the board and the magnificent Carl Heeley. 
PETER NIELSEN
Worcester

Someone needs to seize the initiative
SIR – What an absolute scorcher of a letter from JC Butterfield, “Trade with EU but nothing more,” January 26. Give it some more welly Sir! Sadly our EU referendum is already lost. Do the maths and there are between 18 and 20 million foreigners living here, and they will all be entitled to vote, so those who want out of Europe are already thwarted. And even if the vote was to leave the EU we would be told to vote again until the “Brussels Burghers” got the answer they want. 
The EU is a dictatorship run by unelected European Commissioners. The European Parliament has no right to decide what laws it wants. It is simply there to vote on laws promulgated by the European Commission. Thus the European Parliament exists solely to rubber stamp laws already cobbled together by an unelected elite, which is self-perpetuating. Moreover the EU is fiscally corrupt. In all the years of its existence not one year’s accounts has been approved and signed off.
Britain leaving the EU would result in the EU’s destruction. Europe won’t allow that to happen. Where would Europe dump the millions of people it doesn’t want? One way or another Cameron’s cronies have to con the public into voting to stay in this political, economic, and fiscal farce. And their chosen method will be what it always has been, “Lies” and “Fear,” lies about the “benefits” of Europe, and fear for jobs, fear for our economy, and fear for our wages and living standards. There isn’t a single politician with the gumption and guts to seize the initiative. Sadly we don’t have another “Churchill” to lead our county back to its long held destiny of being a fiercely independent nation carving its own way in the world.
N TAYLOR
Worcester

Leader is making the same mistakes
SIR – Oh dear, a new leader of the county council “determined to make a mark with his first budget” – but with the same built-in mistakes of predecessors.
Your coverage of the £2.2m facelift for town centres was helpful not the least because it included details of how £200,000 would be spent “to kick-start separate studies looking at traffic” in Malvern and Evesham.
Now on the face of it, both studies might be both timely and helpful, but am I alone in thinking that such investigative work ought really be the ideal workload for the county council’s own engineers?
This seems to be another example of work for external consultants, who might be quite professional in their performance - but ultimately very costly to the ratepayers - and who will monitor the results?
By all means be a new leader with fresh ideas and initiatives - but please, please learn from the mistakes of the past.
DR MALCOLM NIXON
Worcester

More bogs in uplands will prevent floods
SIR – I was interested to read the recent correspondence about dredging to prevent floods.
It’s important to understand that a river’s capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment area from which it draws its water.
This means river channels are not large enough to contain extreme floods, even after dredging, as dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume held in the river channel.
The flow of a river can be increased by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream, when the water hits the nearest urban bridge.
Dredging is also extremely expensive, as it must be repeated after every flood, as the river silts up again.
Quite apart from the harm it does to wildlife, it also causes destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel.
To prevent flooding, we need more trees and bogs in the uplands and to make floodplains rougher with trees and other vegetation to hold back the water.
AMY DORR
Evesham