'Feeling blue about a badge? Online applications raise alarms about exclusion' - Your Letters and a burst watermain in 1969 that caused chaos in a rural village - a picture from the archives
Concerns over online-only Blue Badge application systems, calls for a Ludlow building to be demolished, and why one readers would like to see the Shrewsbury Flower Show cancelled permanently - some of the topics up for discussion in your letters today.
We need more offline options
Feeling blue about a badge?
The UK’s push to digitise public services, exemplified by Sandwell Council’s online-only Blue Badge applications from November 10, 2025, is raising alarms about exclusion.
I and others are concerned that elderly and disabled individuals - 46 per cent of over-65s lack internet skills as per Age UK’s July 2025 data - may be cut off from vital support, with no offline alternatives offered.
This shift could breach the Equality Act 2010. Section 19 defines indirect discrimination as a practice disadvantaging those with protected characteristics (age, disability) unless justified, while Section 20 mandates "reasonable adjustments."
Without support, Sandwell’s policy risks non-compliance, a concern echoed by the government’s lagging Digital Inclusion Action Plan, where only 30 per cent of councils provide assisted digital services. While digitalisation may boost efficiency, the current approach threatens isolation. Councils must offer offline options and support hubs to align with equality duties before implementation. This council is not doing enough.
Darryl Magher, Walsall
Time to knock down old Costa
I wrote back in May about the old Costa Coffee shop building in Ludlow (4-5 King Street) and at the time I said I felt that one solution to the problem was the existing building be demolished.
Over the months this feeling has strengthened in me and I would suggest that the building is taken down and a landscaped public area with the church now visible from King Street be left in its place.
It might seem drastic but the present building would cost hundreds of thousands to repair and millions to transform to a habitable flats scheme. To give it a future it has to be occupied and the longer this drags on the less chance of this happening becomes.
There are items of archaeological interest about this building (apparently there is a medieval building at its centre) but these aspects are rotting away with the inaction. With the decline of local shopping and local in town business generally this process may have to be repeated elsewhere.
And a public amenity area, landscaped, lit, maybe with public art would give central Ludlow a needed open space.
