Readers' letters – February 11-13,2020
Everything is going downhill
Everywhere I go in Spalding shopping the litter is getting worse. The shops don’t bother cleaning their doors or windows, guttering and down pipes are broken and shop doorways are being used by homeless. They don’t even try and keep the rubbish together.
I walked past W H Smiths recently and a man was using the doorway as a toilet. It’s not just the parking fees that will put off people shopping in town!
A machine goes round collecting rubbish, but the bins are still overflowing. It’s usually drink bottles and cans, so drinking on the streets if acceptable.
I pick up litter from where I live most days and into town too.
There are no police around, not even the community ones. So everyone is indifferent.
People park their cars where they like, cycles race along pavements, plus electric scooters as well.
It used to be a pretty town with sparkle but everything has gone down. How sad.
M Mitchell
Spalding
Dynamic town could lose trade because of charges
How forward thinking of South Holland District Council to install electric charging points. As an electric van owner it’s very much appreciated, an asset to the well being of a dynamic, enterprising town.
The only criticism I have is of the overal pricing of the process. We have driven extensively across the UK, from Scotland down to Devon; as a consequence we have charged up in quite a few towns.
The charging structure is quite diverse from being no costs to use in northern England and Scotland, whereas for the rest of the country the maximum we have paid was 35p for a 50kw rapid charge.
Machines (similiar to those in Spalding ) are 7kw (fast chargers) and usually free (but can be up to 23p): rarely do we pay a parking fee. Examples are: Springfields has a parking fee of £2 and free electric, Peterborough has both free electric and parking while you shop. Spalding charges are 30p a kw with parking fees of £1.50 upwards, giving an actual 41p kw cost for charging your vehicle.
This is seven kw more than others and another 11p on top of that for parking – making it 19p a kw more than we have ever paid; and they are only fast chargers, not rapid chargers.
With this information I believe Spalding could lose valuable trade to other shopping centres.
Roger Longstaff
via email
Sound bites are not enough
The government must take back control and support the automotive sector if plans announced on Tuesday to phase out diesel, petrol and hybrid vehicles by 2035 are to be successful, Unite, the UK and Ireland’s largest union, has warned.
Unite said that without an integrated industrial strategy to deliver joined up, government-led intervention on a range of fronts, the transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles will not be possible in the time-frame and, worse, will only harm the UK’s jewel in the crown automotive sector alongside the jobs and communities it supports.
Neither big fleet nor private customers will commit to purchasing electric vehicles until confident that the infrastructure to support them is in place and economies of scale reduce the current extortionate purchase costs, the union said.
Unite warned that without direct government support and intervention, the recent announcement is little more than a sound-bite, only serving to further depress the industry, drive investment from UK shores and undermine efforts to encourage the trade-in of older more polluting vehicles.
Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner said: “The challenges of the climate emergency are all around us. We understand and support the drive to clean up our air and to do so as quickly as the technology will allow.”
Indeed, Unite supported Labour’s Green Deal proposals for the automotive sector that had an even more ambitious transition target of 2030. But what it also had, and what the latest announcement lacks, was a clear, government led, interventionist industrial strategy to ensure a just transition and to deliver real change on the ground.
To support such a transition to electric vehicles, government must replace its ‘take back control’ rhetoric and put in place practical detailed actions to deliver a national charging network, invest in 15 minute fast charge facilities on motorways and service stations and standardise plug-in and charging regimes.
But more than this, to maintain the UK’s world class vehicle manufacturing sector, government must lead the way in investment in UK battery manufacturing, giga-factories, power-train, and transmission production, and ensure component manufacture comes back to the UK, reducing the carbon footprint of extended global supply chains and supporting good jobs, skills and apprenticeships in our regions.
Unite understands the challenges we face and supports our companies looking to invest in full electric vehicle production, both battery and hydrogen. But we also recognise the role of hybrid technologies in this transition. The government’s inclusion of hybrid vehicles in its 2035 ban could do enormous damage to the sector. We ask that this be reviewed with the industry and union to find an acceptable and achievable pathway to de-carbonising the sector.
We also recognise the tremendous challenges to transitioning away from diesel for our bus, coach and commercial fleets over such a short time-frame and urge government to join us in developing a workable plan to achieve real progress here.
The stark choice for government is to support our automotive sector now, so it is ready to meet the challenges ahead or watch it drain away as global corporations with options choose to invest overseas and import to meet UK demand. The latter does nothing to address the global challenges of climate change while the former can position us as world leaders for the coming 50 years and beyond.
Sound-bite announcements like this are simply not good enough. We need to move beyond the rhetoric and truly take back control of our economy, use public procurement to pump prime production and reduce vehicle costs, roll out infrastructure and remove older dirtier cars from our roads.
We challenge the government to work with both industry and unions to ensure any transition is managed in a just way, without crashing the car industry in the process and while committing to a interventionist industrial strategy that is key to making a 2035 phase out a success for UK Plc, consumers, our planet and a public already gagging for fresh air.
Rodney Sadd
Union delegate for South Holland & The Deepings , Constituency Labour Party
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: Love is in the air!
This week we celebrate St Valentine’s Day. The Emperor Claudius was concerned that young men were preferring to marry than volunteer for the army. So he banned marriage. However a priest called Valentine continued to marry couples in secret. He was eventually caught and arrested and sentenced to death. Many of the young couples he had married came to visit him in jail. They threw flowers and notes up to his window. They wanted him to know that they, too, believed in love.
One day, he received a visit from the daughter of one of the prison guards, and they often sat and talked for hours. On the day Valentine was to die, he left her a note thanking her for her friendship and loyalty. He signed it, 'Love from your Valentine'. That note started the custom of exchanging love notes on Valentine’s Day. It was written on the day he died, February 14, 269 AD. Now, every year on this day, people remember Saint Valentine, but most importantly, they think about love.
God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them (1 John 4.16).
Bishop Rob Gillion
Interim minister for St John the Baptist Church, Spalding, and Hon Assistant Bishop of Lincoln.
Previously...
Spalding Guardian Letters, February 6
Lincs Free Press and Spalding Guardian Letters, January 28-30
Spalding Guardian Letters, January 23
