Fleming Way delay is so disappointing

In only a few short months, the timescale for the pretentious Fleming Way Bus Boulevard has been extended by probably twelve months or more.

In May, the project was reported as being due for completion by the autumn of 2024.

We are now told that it will “more likely be the end of 2025”.

The issue is an old chestnut “uncharted utilities”- a situation where workers “suddenly find water or gas pipes that they didn’t know existed.

We can be glad that the new administration is being open and honest about this issue.

I think we can be certain that the Conservatives knew that the project would not be completed on time but chose to keep quiet on the matter before the local elections.

Sadly, yet again we have the spectacle of a road project not being completed on time.

I note that Coun Watts didn’t make any reference to the cost.

Perhaps he would like to comment on the overspend a year’s delay will make to the budget for this job.

Many Swindon residents opposed the plan and considered a new bus terminus along the lines of the one built in Exeter could and should have been built.

Naturally, Conservative councillors and the leadership knew best.

Des Morgan

Caraway Drive

Swindon

Don’t be so cruel to migrant children

Last week, the immigration minister Robert Jenrick ordered the painting over murals of cartoon characters at an asylum centre for unaccompanied migrant children.

This was because, in his view, Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry and Winnie the Pooh are too welcoming for traumatised children.

This deliberate policy of targeting unaccompanied children is yet another example of a government which has no decency, humanity or compassion.

It s a government that is in chaos and lurches from one crisis to another.

These children that Robert Jenrick has targeted are the most vulnerable children in the world.

They are children that have travelled thousands of miles and of which have fled unimaginable horrors.

They have arrived on these shores looking for safety and who have nothing apart from the clothes that they are wearing.

Any policy that targets children and is intended to make life more difficult for them is both cruel and inhuman.

It makes me ashamed to live in a country whose government seems to think its acceptable to treat vulnerable children in such a way.

How cruel can this Conservative government get?

Martin Webb,

Old Town

No excuse not to properly fund NHS

Thank you for reminding us how Aneurin Bevan founded the NHS immediately after the Second World War.

The country was in a much worse economic situation then than it is now. And yet the NHS currently is starved of funds and on its knees.

Given the origins of the NHS in serious wartime austerity, it is nonsense to say that the country cannot afford to provide a decent service now, when we are in a much healthier economic situation.

We may currently have economic difficulties, but those difficulties do not compare with the situation in 1947.

Stuart A. Raymond,

Princess Gardens,

Trowbridge