On-street parking is crucial

l am writing in response to a recent front page article, "Urgent call over plans for car park". If Councillor Betty Davies is worried about parking spaces on the high street then she should end her 30-year long campaign to stop on-street parking. If she thinks the town is congested she should get out more often. Apart from a few minor hold-ups, traffic flows very well, in fact so well that a parish council colleague has complained about the speed of the traffic through Cleobury.

For the survival of my business and those of others in the town centre, on-street parking is crucial. Local authorities simply don't care about local services despite their apparent concern with the introduction of lots of consultative partnerships. The best they can offer after seven years is the old parking chestnut and a zebra crossing.

Many people in Cleobury are very complacent about these proposed schemes because they don't live on the main street. People from the main street will have to park on the side streets so eventually the whole town will have yellow lines to force everyone to pay for using the car parks.

Not long ago Cleobury had a working police station, an ambulance station, a swimming pool and a refuse collection service.

Dr Chris Dimond, chairman of the Cleobury Country Partnership, must look at a very different Cleobury to me if he hasn't noticed there has already been a loss of at least 50 per cent of the shops in the last five years.

Gordon Brown, Cleobury Mortimer