Editor,

Top marks to the person who said the rise in council tax is not acceptable.

Every year it goes up more and more, accompanied by the rhetoric of where it goes and why.

This is just a smokescreen to cover up ineptitude.

They can find money to buy businesses up north?

You can bet your life that this month the departments that have not spent their 2023 budgets will be stocking up on staples and paper clips, or maybe a new digger?

They will then whinge to our useless bunch of councillors, who will agree to fleece Brits again.

What about those Liberal dimwits! Wanted to put it up 10 per cent and weasel themselves out of the system for doing it.

I am definitely voting for them!

What we need are councillors with intelligence, common sense, and backbone.

Know any?

John Norreys

West Buckland

---

There was no information given to residents about the closure to pedestrians of the footpath by the toilets. The first time that I knew something was going to happen was at the beginning of the week ( March 18) when I saw a sign had been put up at the entrance to the Asda car park saying pedestrians could not use the footpath by the toilets.

This made crossing the road there quite dangerous. Today, March 22, thank goodness more signs warning folk to crossover further down the road are now in place, but traffic cones have been placed in the road near signs showing that the width of the road will be reduced on one side!

What on earth are the council thinking of having the demolition taking place after Easter when we have already been notified by Wessex Water that part of North Street will be closed April 2-12.

It is going to be bedlam with extra traffic from North Street, more danger for pedestrians and if the road is narrowed, more problems with buses and the number of lorries that will be using Longforth Road.

---

Dear Editor

Cats Protection and Songbird Survival have teamed up to offer advice on the best ways to help reduce hunting of songbirds by cats.

A survey of 1,000 cat owners (by Songbird Survival) revealed almost half (46%) aren’t aware of ways to reduce cat predation. 

Hunting is a natural, innate behaviour and cats feel driven to do it. Not all cats hunt and it reduces as they age. Just a few simple strategies can protect birds and benefit cat welfare.

Spring is a particularly vulnerable time for songbirds as we are in the nesting and breeding season, which runs up to July as they gather materials to make nests and fledglings begin to leave their nests.

It’s important to protect songbird populations from decline and cat owners and bird lovers alike can make a big difference by putting up nest boxes as well as not using pesticides in their gardens.

Top tips for reducing hunting:

For further advice, please visit Songbird Survival’s Get EduCated campaign at https://songbirdsos.org/get-educated or Cats Protection’s website at www.cats.org.uk/garden-and-outdoors  

Yours faithfully,

Nicky Trevorrow, Cats Protection Behaviour Manager and Susan Morgan, CEO of Songbird Survival

---

"We ought to be using prime land to produce health-enhancing food, not treating it as expendable" (Prof Tim Lang Feeding Britain 2021)

The question never asked is "What does the loss of this prime land cost us for example in terms of daily bread?"

Gladman Developments' proposal at Rockwell Green is one of several current schemes. This would take out of production a significant area (15.7 Hectares) of prime arable land. Various sources of published data show this could produce around 200,000 loaves of bread per year, which based on UK flour Mills 2022 data would be enough bread for more than 3,000 people each year.

Such loss of prime land is part of an alarming pattern that has developed over recent decades. In the early 1980s I carried out professional Agricultural Land Classification surveys of several hundred hectares of wheat land around Monkton Heathfield. All of these have now been extensively developed and permanently lost from food production.

Taunton and Wellington are fortunate to be set within areas of prime land defined as Best and Most Versatile (BMV) by the National Planning Policy Framework 2012. In less than 20 years a significant proportion of this land has been successively lost to development.

In 1975 when the UK population was only 53 million, Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed Itself? predicted that we could not. Nearly 50 years later our population is over 67 million (ONS Dec 2022) and we now need to import almost half our food from overseas.

To quote Tim Lang, "UK land use policy is profligate". To continue to recklessly squander our most productive land leaves us ever more vulnerable and dependent on imported food.