Following on from the disgrace and exposure of City of York Council spending £1m on gagging staff who are leaving (£1m for city council’s 68 ‘gag clauses’, July 24) to further read in The Press of children with special educational needs and their school bus services facing significant funding issues (School bus budget under pressure, July 26) fills me with anger.

These services patently need more money from central government, not less. Overspends totalling £1,596,000 linked to the children’s transport, education, and communities budgets and disabled children’s short breaks is self explanatory.

Why is it always the social care side for people with special needs who are so dependant on it that takes the hardest hits every time?

However, in the same paper a few pages on is another council wasteful spend of £98,000 on Cllr Nigel Ayre’s two-year-long standards issue (Councillor asks for an apology, July 26). The fact that he has now been totally exonerated of any blame shows how very wrong and incompetent City of York Council’s judgement likely was in launching the investigation in the first place.

Such huge sums of money being so wrongly used is everyday reading now. Thank God we still have the power of The Press in York to expose these matters through The Freedom of Information Act, without which we would never be aware of such things going on at all with taxpayers’ hard earned money!

Peter Boulton,

Orchard Gardens, York