Letters: The expanded Ulez means fresh challenges for families and carers

SIR  – If Christian Froggatt (Letters, August 30) needed to make regular trips to visit elderly parents who now live within the ultra-low emission zone, perhaps he would not ask why its expansion is a problem.

Joan Brown
Sanderstead, Surrey

SIR  – Am I alone in finding it ironic that I now need to pay the Ulez charge at Heathrow when more than 530 take-offs and landings take place there each day? Are all the airport vehicles compliant?

George Atkinson-Clark
Preston Deanery, Northamptonshire

SIR – People who have their doubts about the Ulez expansion would do well to look into more potential erosion of freedoms coming soon. 

An organisation called C40, which describes itself as “a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis” and is currently chaired by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, has a list of climate-related ambitions. These include: discouraging private transport, encouraging meat-free diets and the spread of 15-minute cities, aiming to cut all food waste and limit everybody to one flight per person every three years, and implementing something called “a green and just recovery” from Covid. 

They will claim that this is a vision for the distant future, yet we have just seen how Ulez was imposed on London.

Ted Andrews
Huntly, Aberdeenshire

SIR – Although my current car is a 2017 registration, I am thinking of saving for a new one in case the Ulez compliance rules change and the zone is expanded to my home in Winchester. 

After all, I am only 72 miles from the centre of London, and who would rule it out given recent experience?

Michael Turner
Winchester, Hampshire

SIR – The authorities want to make it more and more difficult for people to drive cars into towns and cities.

Meanwhile, the Government has endorsed proposals to close 1,000 railway ticket offices, making it harder for a significant number of people who want to leave the car at home to travel by train. And we are told this represents modernisation. 

Bernard Hadley
Budleigh Salterton, Devon

SIR – For 43 years I have lived on the Ridgway in Wimbledon, which is a main road. The sticky black grime that collects on the window sills is proof of the pollution caused by the heavy volume of traffic, which includes large cars driven into London because it is so much more convenient than using the plentiful public transport.

Are we all prepared to make personal sacrifices to mitigate climate change, or aren’t we?

Frances Rich
London SW19
 

Air traffic security

SIR – If one small piece of rogue data in a flight plan can wreak such havoc on the National Air Traffic Service (report, August 30), just imagine the chaos if Russia or China got serious in wanting to cause disruption.

Paul d’Apice
Dawlish, Devon 

SIR – My 40-year career was in IT. It’s a fact that any non-trivial system will have bugs. The most obscure I encountered was with Y2K – the year 2000 software problem. 

Messages received by our system had been handled perfectly since 1984. But at Y2K, one particular, fairly infrequent message type was occasionally rejected. Resubmission of the message worked fine. The cause of the rejection took ages to find: it was the message arriving during the first minute of an hour (the “00” minute). I defy any system tester to show that they would have tested every message type for arriving at every minute of an hour. Where would the testing stop?

So yes, millions of transactions can be processed perfectly, but that is no guarantee that a bug isn’t lurking.

The other mantra is Murphy’s Law: if something can go wrong, it will. That’s why I use the convenience of, but don’t trust, such things as cloud storage; I maintain an offline backup.

Keith Ougden
Paphos, Cyprus

SIR – My airline career provided great insights to the workings of the National Air Traffic Service. 

Without its progressive changes to systems and protocols, training and staff adaptability, there’s no way that it would be in a position to handle the volumes of air traffic that it does. 

Unfortunately, when things do go wrong, the effects are not only adverse but show themselves very quickly, with a planned reversion to manual procedures, and much lower capacity available to continue with safe operations.

Michael Carrivick
Wokinghham, Berkshire

SIR – In September last year Aer Lingus suffered major computer problems and 51 planes were grounded in Dublin.

Thousands of passengers were left searching in vain for hotel rooms that were being double and triple booked, at a time when accommodation was already under strain with a large pop concert being hosted in the city. I was en route from the warmer climes of San Francisco, and found myself shivering without a coat and facing a night on the streets, as I searched fruitlessly for even the most basic hotel room. 

It was very much thanks to the kindness of a Pakistani taxi driver, who phoned numerous hotels for me – way beyond the call of duty – that I eventually found a room after queuing in a hotel lobby for three hours. The usual cost of €170 was inflated to €500. 

Although no admission was made, a cyber attack was suspected. Our airlines and air traffic systems need to be better prepared for these eventualities.

Ann O’Brien
Leeds, West Yorkshire 
 

List mentality

SIR – Dr Joanna Nolan suggests that women make more lists than men (report, August 30). 

For work I find lists and priorities are essential, but outside work I enjoy a freer approach – except when despatched to the shops by my wife to buy food. I prioritise the list she always provides me with, and lob non-essential items into the trolley as I stumble upon them. 

That way we are both happy.

Tony Parrack
London SW20
 

Notting Hill carnage

SIR – It’s well beyond time for the organisers of the Notting Hill Carnival to accept what the wider public see: that it is not the costumes and floats, but the open gang warfare, stabbings, violent and sexual assaults on police officers, displays of weapons and drug abuse that are the defining features of this event (“Carnival violence has become ‘unsustainable’”, report, August 30). 

Before more police officers are seriously injured or worse, the carnival should be divided, allowing the children’s parade to continue, but moving the main carnival to a Royal Park, where it could attempt to recover a reputation as a genuine cultural celebration.

Roy A C Ramm
Great Dunmow, Essex
 

Inefficient British Gas

SIR – I am in my mid 80s and live on my own. I suffer from degenerative arthritis and its attendant limitations, needing daily carers.

British Gas, from which I purchase both gas and electricity, sent me an email asking for meter readings. My meters are in a cupboard under the stairs with a “smart” reader, which has not worked for some years. 

Protracted “discussion” online with a machine produced a date for a meter reader to visit. Such a visit took place, but the man would only read the electricity meter. Exactly one week later, another person called to read the gas meter. 
Perhaps British Gas’s efficiency could be improved if it gave me a smart meter that works.

Chris Spencer
Reading, Berkshire
 

Poet and batsman

SIR – Siegfried Sassoon’s days as a cricketer (Letters, August 29) are also covered in the first two of his autobiographical works, The Old Century and The Weald of Youth. 

Both books describe how, even at a very young age, he combined his love of cricket with writing poetry. They also show Sassoon’s sense of humour. In The Old Century he writes: “But fifties, as I well knew, were seldom made on Matfield Green; in fact when I’d played there for the first time, a few weeks before, the other side had been all out for thirteen, though I’d scored eight runs myself, owing to them bowling underhand at me.” 

Sassoon later became quite an accomplished middle-order batsman.

David S Ainsworth
Denton, Lancashire
 

The many rewards of baking bread at home 

SIR – With regard to Xanthe Clay’s article on bread (Features, August 30), it never ceases to amaze me that people buy bread wrapped in plastic. 

Yes, it is convenient, but making your own is so easy. Apart from buying a breadmaker, there are many people out there who will show you how to do it, and there is plenty of advice on the internet. Using just four ingredients – flour, water, yeast and salt – is so satisfying. The added benefits of no additives and the superior taste make it a no-brainer, and one can even bake very nice bread in an air fryer – the device that everyone is buying at the moment.

Malcolm Rodker
Poole, Dorset
 

A plan for funding the fight against car theft

SIR – As a former head of a stolen vehicle squad, I first became aware of hacking technology for car theft at a conference in 2005 (“Keyless car hacking tech to be banned after rapid rise in high-end vehicle thefts”, report, August 29). 
There have been constant calls in the intervening years for these devices to be banned. Why has it taken nearly 20 years to respond?

This high-value class of cross-border crime is the most commercially viable of any class of crime the police deal with. Yet the Government has shown little in the way of imagination, innovation and creativity to take advantage of this. For example, Essex’s car theft recovery unit has recovered £16 million this year. I would be amazed if this unit cost more than £500,000 a year to run.

Since 1985, many states in America have imposed a compulsory annual levy of $1 on each vehicle insurance policy, which has been invested in vehicle crime enforcement. These have consistently delivered commercial returns of $5 to $9, and resulted in lower premiums for customers.

Just £1 on each vehicle policy in the UK would, for the first time, create a national cross-border response to fund 12 regional vehicle squads capable of delivering huge commercial returns and public benefits well in excess of their cost.
When are our political and police leaders going to wake up to this potential?

Mike Barron
Retired detective inspector
Preston, Lancashire
 

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