SIR – It is a pity that some people, including your editorial writer, do not seem to appreciate the green belt and its importance in preventing development sprawling into the countryside and joining towns together. This is the only reason there are no houses near the site proposed for the zoo.

The land in question will already be a home to animals in the form of British wildlife many of which are under threat at present. A more acceptable use for the site would be to manage it for wildlife with the addition of a pond and a wildflower meadow for example.

TERRY GREEN

Droitwich

Brexiteers are inventing lies

SIR – As Mark Twain observed (and was later quoted by Winston Churchill), “a lie is half-way round the world before the truth has got its pants on”. For sure, there’s been abundant evidence of this in the Brexit campaign.

With exquisite timing, just one day after Matt Jenkins (Letters, June 7) pointed out, correctly, that the EU’s accounts have, contrary to popular myth, indeed been signed off by auditors every year since at least 2007, T Munslow (June 8) recycles the untruth that they’ve not been signed off “for the past 18 years”.

Just plain wrong!

It must be abundantly clear to all with eyes to see and willingness to understand that the Brexit campaign’s political leaders, and their national press cheer-leaders, are playing irresponsible games with the electorate. One national commentator has described this as “offering dishonesty, snake-oil and outright deception”. It is most definitely not about evidence-base, but, rather, about cynical invention and dog-whistles.

The EU (in particular, immigration from it) has become a catch-all explanation for grievance after grievance. The reality is rather more nuanced than this reading, and searing disappointment awaits should we vote to leave.

By the way, on the subject of sovereignty, a Financial Times commentator has remarked that “the castaway alone on a desert island may be sovereign over all that he or she surveys”, but is also “impotent”.

DAVID BARLOW

Worcester

We can thrive without EU

SIR – The big bad wolf of Brexit is a myth peddled with unrelenting vigour by the Remain campaign.

It has become increasingly hysterical as one after the other the nightmares are described from more austerity to suffering economy and just to sex it up a bit a bonfire of workers’ rights and even a hint of Armageddon.

How can anyone take all this seriously when we know we survived and thrived for centuries without being in the EUand other countries do very nicely without it?

Also, that the Eurozone is like a pack of cards waiting to fall and we have long become the job centre for Europe beckoning a brighter future for unlimited millions of citizens while our public services and housing provision is at crisis levels and a generation puts its life goals on hold thanks to the ever elusive prospect of their own home and sky- high rents.

The Prime Minister is prepared to surrender millions daily to the EU while people are brought to their knees by the bedroom tax and welfare benefits and public services have been slashed tells us that an army of experts, from respected economists to the IMF, say that for us to leave will spell disaster.

What was David Cameron thinking of in calling a referendum on this apparently dangerous concept when he must have heard those warnings before he did so? No reliable leader would want to divide his nation and compromise its economic security by providing the electorate with even an opportunity of making such a calamitous mistake.

ANDREW BROWN

Worcester

Price change has helped

SIR – I would like to reassure readers that National Lottery Good Causes have not received less money following our decision to change the price of Lotto in 2013 (‘Worcester’s £52 million lottery cash boost’). In fact, this change and the subsequent change we made to the game last October have meant that Good Causes have received over £450 million more than if we’d done nothing to the game.

MIRANDA PUGH

Head of Media Relations, Camelot

Thanks for the gridlock!

SIR – Could I through your letters page congratulate Worcestershire Highways on managing to gridlock Droitwich and surroundings by allowing traffic lights and cones with no regard for their effect on each other. I do not call them roadworks as you cannot see any work most of the time.The area has become a free for all for developers and utility companies working for them.

PAUL CHANDLER

Droitwich

We foot bill for child killer

SIR – how much it has cost the taxpayer to keep this monster (‘Child killer could walk free’, June 8) fed, clothed and looked after for the past 40-odd years?

EMERSON FRYER

Bodenham