WHO wouldn’t sympathise with PR Willey and his small, elite team of hard-working and hard-pressed street-cleaning operatives (Letters, July 22)?

However, I don’t feel too sympathetic towards your correspondent Bryan Lawson whose letter of July 21 seemed to miss the point that most of the residents submitting letters about the state of paths, pavements and surrounds do so because they are proud of York but are sometimes distressed by conditions underfoot.

One recent letter writer is one of those unsung, public-spirited heroes, a volunteer litter picker, motivated in this role by pride in the city.

Another who took exception to Mr Lawson’s tone is a local person who “stoops to scoop” whenever the need arises which is rather often. When walking the dog or steering a pushchair, she’s primed to pick up detritus dropped by the ‘litterati’. The problem for her is that, having accumulated other people’s rubbish, she is often confronted by quite a trek to locate a litter bin.

Maybe the council, in culling these bins, reasoned that by heightening their scarcity value, using them would become more desirable. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I wish ‘Councillor Baldrick’ would stop devising his cunning plans.

Derek Reed, Middlethorpe Drive, York.