IN response to your article ‘Retail heart is being ripped out of town centre’ (Examiner, August 5), I would like to reassure your readers that our proposed new store in Southgate will create hundreds of new jobs.
This is a major investment in Huddersfield in these uncertain economic times that we believe will help protect and enhance the vibrancy of the town.
We recognise that this is a challenging time for all businesses and have been carefully working on our proposals for over two years now. Particular attention has been made to the design of our proposed new store to encourage our customers to shop with us and to visit the town centre.
We anticipate that the stores’ free parking, improved pedestrian routes and excellent bus services will be taken advantage of by shoppers with the town centre a short walk away. Indeed, many of our customers told us that they would do exactly that when we discussed this during our recent in-store consultation.
Our plans will also help to kick start the wider regeneration of Southgate which would see our existing site redeveloped into high quality housing, restaurants, a new hotel, office space and additional town centre parking.
I would like to thank local people for their support and to assure them that we have been working hard to bring these investment and employment opportunities to Huddersfield.
Jennifer Duncan
Tesco Regional Corporate Affairs Manager
Yorkshire’s finest
WITH regard to the intent to put fluoride in the water supply, how will this affect myself and others who are diabetic?
I have to drink a lot of water and Yorkshire Water is the finest that I have tasted.
Bernice Fleming
Huddersfield
Location problem
ONE problem I have with fluoride in the water is what happens in a drought? Is water sent from other sources in Yorkshire which doesn’t have fluoride?
What if they have a drought? Do they get toxic water and would they be informed?
Yorkshire Water can pipe water to anywhere in the region but I fail to see how they can ensure it doesn’t come out of my tap in Brighouse when someone 200 yards down the road in Fixby gets it.
Iain Spencer
Brighouse
Toxic chemical alert
I AM against adding fluoride to our water supply.
Our bodies have enough to content with without yet another foreign chemical which is also very toxic.
Mrs N Gledhill
Skelmanthorpe
Fluoride debate goes on
REGARDING the article ‘Fluoride debate is back on’ (Examiner, August 11).
The definitive British study into fluoridation was the Systematic Review carried out by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) at the University of York.
A statement on the CRD’s website entitled ‘What the York Review on the fluoridation of drinking water really found’ says: “We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide.
What evidence we found suggested that water fluoridation was likely to have a beneficial effect, but that the range could be anywhere from a substantial benefit to a slight disbenefit to children’s teeth.
This beneficial effect comes at the expense of an increase in the prevalence of fluorosis (mottled teeth). The quality of this evidence was poor.
An association with water fluoride and other adverse effects such as cancer, bone fracture and Down’s syndrome was not found. However, we felt that not enough was known because the quality of the evidence was poor.
The evidence about reducing inequalities in dental health was of poor quality, contradictory and unreliable.”
The York scientists called for further studies into possible adverse health effects of fluoridation but these have not been carried out.
A report on the toxicology of fluoride by the (US) National Research Council deals mainly with fluoride levels in water of two to four times the level (1ppm) usually proposed for fluoridation in the UK. It concludes that 4ppm is unsafe for long-term ingestion and that some people are more susceptible to fluoride’s toxic effects than others. This indicates that fluoridation affords no adequate safety margin to protect vulnerable groups such as babies and kidney patients against long-term adverse effects.
Elizabeth A McDonagh
Chairman, National Pure Water Association
Moorland vegetable plot
THE government states we should be using agricultural land for growing crops and vegetables and the national press says there is a huge demand for allotments – surely parts of Lindley Moor could be revitalised for this purpose.
As well some kind of parkland and picnic areas, why not have a community farm with geese, hens goats plus fruit trees, flowers and beekeeping.
Huddersfield University could even use some of the area for its agriculture students to learn farming practices or schoolchildren could be involved so expanding their knowledge in nature and ecology.
Once developers are let in the whole area will quickly become built up and I totally agree with John Procter’s letter (Examiner, August 10).
Locally Laund Road, which borders Lindley Moor, has seen massive housing developments over the past few years with single houses and groups of houses squeezed into what were people’s gardens – a foretaste of things to come should building start on Lindley Moor.
Mrs A. Ennis
Lindley
Proof of police pudding
INSPECTOR Adrian Waugh’s comments (Examiner letters August 12), in response to my letter last month about burglary experiences, fail to inspire me with any confidence whatsoever concerning community policing.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I am sure Inspector Waugh considers that his team is doing a wonderfully committed and focused job.
However the statistics that are published – even after massage – do not bear this out. Nor do the feelings of most people I come into contact with.
It shouldn’t be necessary to have time wasting meetings to establish ‘what the public wants’ nor to develop PR orientated propaganda such as the Policing Pledge.
It’s not rocket science; most honest law-abiding and hardworking members of the community simply want to feel safe and protected
The police force however, is in my opinion, too wrapped up in enforcing and policing political correctness and human rights legislation in all it’s suffocating complexity and doesn’t have its eye on the ball anymore.
The obsessive and pedantic ‘i’ dotting and ‘t’ crossing imposed on the police by the Crown Prosecution Service serves only to make the problem worse and at the end of the day we don't get justice anyway, so why bother?
Mr Grumpy
Almondbury
Look out for the sheep
MOVING hazard and no one looks – sheep on the road.
Most car drivers do not even think about sheep when they drive out of Marsden and up the hill to the moors.
Not most of the locals anyway. I had two 4 x 4s behind me and one passed me suddenly and then had to break because of the sheep.
It was heavy mist and neither had put their lights on.
Only Tuesday, with a bad mist, two cars flew past me and up the hill, suddenly breaking to miss sheep in the road.
I saw two dead ones by the side of the road, one before the pub on the left and one after.
About six hundred yards before the cafe there were two sheep sitting under a front garden wall sheltering from the rain.
I do not pretend to be perfect but I always drive with care up this road.
As an aside, when the sheep passed, I came across what looked like a family: two sheep and two little lambs following; except it was on the Manchester to Sheffield road, just before the Holmfirth moors turn-off.
I will be very pleased when next year, I think, it will be compulsory for drivers to have dipped headlights on, as most of Europe. I am fed up with stupid and lazy drivers, who cannot be bothered to put lights on in wet and dark weather.
Martin Fletcher
Berry Brow
One way ticket for MP
THEY do seem to struggle to get it, don’t they?
The millionaire MP Alan Duncan, Conservative this time as it happens, ‘jokes’ that £64,000 per annum is so little to live on that MPs are reduced to living on ‘rations’.
Will someone tell this idiot that we expect pensioners to live on something around £5,000 – that’s per year, not per month, Mr Duncan, and without ‘expenses’ to top it up.
And that the national minimum wage is around £12,000 per annum.
Rather more to the point, will David Cameron tell this chappie where to go?
I do hope so – Duncan can easily afford a one-way ticket to anywhere.
Bill Armer
Deighton
