LETTER: Councillors should be ashamed of our A27 verges

These highways together with the roundabouts at Beddingham and Southerham and numerous other examples, illustrate the totally unacceptable attitudes and actions of Town, District and County Councils along with Highways Agency (England) towards their various responsibilities for cleansing.

What happened to the Environmental Protection Act 1990, which required authorities to maintain varying specified levels of cleanliness for various categories of highway and verge, with penalties if the set standards of cleanliness were not recovered within specified periods of time councillors (elected by residents to maintain and protect our environment) should be thoroughly ashamed for allowing parts of our superb county to deteriorate to such a degree.

Visitors must be appalled as they travel through, as are local residents, but everyone must take responsibility for some littering.

After all Local Authorities do not normally generate the litter, but it is easy for them to hide behind the popular notions of ‘need for economy’ and ‘health and safety’ restrictions.

Budgets have traditionally been limited, hence one reason for the ‘Compulsory Competitive Tendering’ legislation imposed on authority workforces in the 1980s, but why such a disgraceful drop in standards in recent times?

Health and safety requirements can be satisfied by the issue of correct protective clothing and advance signing on single lane highways and rolling lane closures and/or suitable rolling block vehicles on dual lane highways.

Authorities must get a grip and sort it. Maybe if councillors spent a little less time on pathetic political bickering in the letters columns of the press!

Mr R J Bone

Seaford