YOUR piece on extra cash to fix potholes (£1m extra cash to fix city roads, November 13) exposes the fiction of devolution from the current Conservative government.
After seeing York forced to cut almost £100 million over the past decade, the Government dishes out a bit of money here and bit of money there and residents are supposed to be grateful.
It highlights the vice-like grip at Westminster of both this and the former Tory-Lib Dem coalition governments in centralising power and resources and simply throwing scraps from the table to local councils around the country.
The reality is York suffers with some of the worst roads in the country because of its existing poor level of funding.
So the £100 million of cuts put an extra £1 million for potholes into context. What state would our roads be in without the loss of so much money?
While Yorkshire needs to play its own part in getting devolution for the region sorted, the Government must take responsibility for delivering genuine decision-making to the local level by calling time on the central control model that tells York what its priorities are and even then, isn’t willing to properly fund them.
Cllr Stuart Barnes,
Labour spokesperson for transport,
Pottery Lane, York
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