'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

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.

Colin Sheward, Ludlow

Uncle Norbert’s Budget ideas

After yet another invigorating and mind refreshing walk in the Great British countryside, Uncle Norbert and I treat ourselves to lashings of hot steaming strong tea and pre-Winter slabs of Aunt Dolly's Winter cake.

Totally refreshed and fighting fit we decide to work out how to make the UK financially solvent and in the space of just 15 minutes we have produced our own Budget.

True, Uncle Norbert and I have absolutely no financial expertise at all, only working and life expertise, which means we have a better chance of solving the country's problem than the Smiling Chancellor of Exchequer; she who must be ignored. By the way are those her own teeth or is she wearing them in for a friend?

Although influenced by economists such as John Maynard Keynes, Milton Freidman and Mrs Evadne Scrooge of Skint in North Yorkshire, we have decided to apply our own financial theory; "If It Moves Tax It!"

Our Budget:

• People with big noses to pay tax for using more air. 
• French nationals who are UK based to be taxed for being French. 
• Gaseous taxes to be applied to Brussels sprouts, cabbage and baked beans. 
• A Stiletto Shoe tax for pavement damage whether worn by men or women. 
• Super fit people always running around in tracksuits to be taxed for annoying Uncle Norbert and I.
• Tall people taxed for taking up too much room and short people taxed for not taking up enough room.

Over to you Rachel.

Peter Steggles, Rushbury

Flower show is living off past

I see it's all gone quiet now about the Shrewsbury Flower Show being cancelled.

Personally I believe it should be cancelled permanently, it's long past it's best by date. I have both worked stalls there and gone as a visitor, and now you could not pay me to go. It is living off its past and a time gone by.

Ron Wilson, Shrewsbury

Buy a stamp from a postman

Why don’t postmen and postwomen sell postage stamps? If they did, the decline in postal use would be reversed.

Most people don’t want to have to travel to a post office to buy a stamp, and then wait in a queue for half an hour, so use emails.

W F Kerswell, Picklescott

So where does Mr Jenrick live?

I quote Mr Jenrick: "I want people to be living alongside each other", and "I want to live in a country where people are properly integrated", and "It's incredibly important we have a fully integrated society".

Well, but I bet Mr Jenrick wouldn't want a properly / fully integrated society, where people live alongside each other anywhere near where he and his family live!

Where does he live, anyway? I know he was born in Wolverhampton and went to our grammar school around the corner from where I live here. But he certainly doesn't live in Wolverhampton now! 

Does he live in Newark, his constituency? 

I bet his house isn't in the middle of a community that's properly/fully integrated – or is it?

What do I know?!

Mrs Renée Young, West Midlands

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