SIR – It is encouraging to learn that the council intend to improve the look of Worcester by investing in new paved areas. However, wasn’t this done quite recently?
Alas, Broad Street and the High Street will always be a problem if cheap inappropriate surfaces are laid as lorries and vans have to use it on a daily basis. 
Ideally you should not have a pedestrianised area which also allows traffic, especially when the shops have opened. You may as well revert to the old system of a pavement and a road.
As for the Shambles, if the council are looking for heritage status why not help this bid by removing A-boards and laying durable cobblestones as it would have had in its heyday?
C D LEE
Worcester

UK too overpopulated to be self-sufficient 
SIR – Peter Talbot’s “Going vegan is the answer to global warming” (January 25) strikes me as being a right load of cobblers. Where are the references to peer reviewed scientific research? As far as I can see his letter isn’t based upon a single demonstrable scientific fact.
The New Scientist magazine postulated that our nation only has the renewable resources to sustain 10 million of us long term. Our farms can only feed some 35 million of us, which means most of what sustains us has to be imported. That means our country is vastly overpopulated.
Were our country to reduce its population to long term environmentally sustainable levels we could chuck as much “junk” into our atmosphere as needed, and our planetary systems would cope. 
Within decades our population will become 100 million, because our clowns are bringing more than half a million people a year to our nation for “growth.” Those whom we elect to manage our affairs are stark raving bonkers, as can be seen from their lunatic SWDP, which (I understand) the Green Party supports.
Some Green Party then eh? I concluded long ago that the Green Party is irrelevant. 
After all, what sort of idiots cover our farmland with concrete, when they know our nation cannot grow anywhere near enough food to feed our people? Emissions aren’t our problem. Our problem is there are far too many of us! 
N TAYLOR
Worcester


Not joining combined authority is a mistake
SIR – I believe the decision of Worcestershire County Council to rule itself out of the West Midlands Combined Authority was a mistake. The decision was missed by most people and failed to ignite a debate among the public.
The controlling Tories, having already made up their minds, arrogantly assumed that that was the end of the matter as far as they were concerned. The former leader of the County Council, Councillor Adrian Hardman, had been invited by the combined authority’s shadow chairman to give full consideration to joining.
He said that he would “welcome your county and districts deciding to join”. Councillor Hardman’s response was that “I’m not proposing any discussions on forming a combined authority at all.”(Worcester News 18 Sept 2015).
The consequence of this decision will be to deny Worcestershire participation in a long list of progressive developments in infrastructure, environmental protection, industrial investment, employment, housing and much else. The Tories prefer an arrangement like Cornwall’s devolution agreement with Whitehall.
The difference is Cornwall does not have a dynamic powerhouse on its doorstep such as the West Midlands. 
The attitude will not change with the new leader at County Hall, Councillor Simon Geraghty. He also wants a deal “similar to Cornwall”.
So that’s it then. We are to remain a Tory fiefdom without having a say about it.
A Tory banana republic with buses for the poor and old and excluded from any metropolitan rail scheme and our waste burned in a polluting incinerator instead of being recycled. And so on. Outrageous.
PETER NIELSEN
Worcester

Money needs to be spent at home first
SIR – How wrong can you be Rev David Haslam (February 4). The seven individuals caught in Badsey, illegally I might add, were not (as you described) refugees but economic migrants looking for a free handout.
The dreadful conditions you mention in Calais and Dunkirk are of their own making, how long does it take to clear up rubbish? Also nobody asked these fit young men (including 2 teenagers, not children) to leave the sanctity of France and all the other safe countries they must have passed through to get to Britain. 
They only come here Rev. Haslam because they know they will get money, clothing and somewhere to live courtesy of British taxpayers. This money could and should be spent on our ex-soldiers who are now destitute. Charity begins at home and not to undeserving economic migrants.
PETER GREEN
Evesham

Keep weather supplied from within the UK
SIR – Readers please join others supporting a petition to the BBC to keep its weather contract with the met office. We have to keep the weather supplied from within the United Kingdom.
Go to website www.petition.co.uk enter section environment sign petition weather contract.
If you do not have internet access please ask family or friends.
FE SHARPE
Plymouth