I MAY not be highly educated, I may not have more than average intelligence, but I think I know what makes financial sense, and creating a position of paying a person to work out unnecessary ways to spend other people's money is wrong, and one of the very things that got this country into the financial mess it is in.

I refer to last weeks front page of the 'Review' reporting that Norther Arc or whatever it is called is to be resurrected under another name.

I must state at the start I wish to give no offence to the person in charge of this Forest of Dean intrusion. She is only fulfilling a task that has been given to her and I'm sure she must be very competent in this role.

But we must ask ourselves does the Forest of Dean need more roads, more buildings and more intrusion into its environment? This most awful of governments set up the Coalfield Regeneration Fund (the body financing this) partly with money  snaffled from the miners' pension fund (I think they learned from Robert Maxwell) to help areas devastated in the pit closures.

So our council at that time sent a representative to beg for some of this money, and with a lot of handwringing and cringing they convinced this silly government that the people of this area were so poor they were practically living on bread and water, and so the Forest of Dean area was given some of this ill-gotten money. Remember this was some 40 years after our pits closed (this was a time when the Forest of Dean looked after itself and did not go begging for hand outs).

Leave our Forest alone, it doesn't need so-called regeneration with costly infrastructure. Nature itself will regenerate it and in a way that its meant to be regenerated. Remember this is a rural area and long may it remain.–

I. G. Ellis, Ellwood Road.