HOUSING: THE Public Accounts Committee of MPs has concluded that the transfer of 750,000 council houses to new landlords across Britain was undersold to the value of billions of pounds.

Apparently, the calculations used by councils to work out how much the new landlords should pay was flawed. It is the taxpayer once again who is subsidising this privatisation.

The PAC has concluded what campaigners in defence of council housing have been arguing: that this is why the process of stock transfer is a sham. Middlesbrough Council should stop the stock transfer of its 13,000 council houses immediately. - Geoff Kerr-Morgan, Middlesbrough.

DURHAM TOLL

FOR how much longer is Durham County Council to be allowed to operate the vehicle destroying device which masquerades as toll-collection equipment in Durham Market Place?

At about 3:15pm on July 10, my wife and I witnessed a vehicle being damaged in Durham Market Place by the equipment designed to collect payment from drivers using Saddler Street en route from Palace Green.

We understand that this is by no means the first vehicle to be so damaged and we have written to Durham County Council urging it to make the equipment safe before it causes personal injury and more damage to vehicles.

The unfortunate driver of the vehicle concerned stopped at the payment point, inserted two coins, then drove forward to collide with the post which was still in the above-ground position. This caused significant damage to the front of the vehicle and no doubt some degree of shock to the driver.

We noted that the post cannot be seen by the driver; the 'stop' and 'proceed' lights are wrongly positioned and the descent and ascent of the post is too rapid.

We believe it is only a matter of time before a driver is seriously injured or dies as a result of the malfunctioning of this equipment or because of ignorance as to how it operates.

We will never take our car past this equipment and would strongly recommend other drivers to follow our example. - Ken and Moira Holroyd, Belmont.

COUNCIL FINANCES

I HAVE recently returned from Kent where, contrary to actions here in County Durham, councillors have opted to take a pay cut.

In addition to refusing a big rise in councillors' allowances, recommended by an independent body, Cabinet members are taking a ten per cent pay cut, stating that: "It is our priority to put services for local people first". - A Kelly, Ferryhill.

ENVIRONMENT

IN 1967-8 Durham County Council, at enormous cost, levelled the pit heaps that were a legacy of our mining past and so we have nothing left to commemorate the heroism of the miners who won the coal that made Britain great.

And now, with ex-miners few and far between and growing fewer, such was the life-threatening nature of the work, soon all memory of the most significant episode in Britain's industrial history will be gone.

Actually, left to themselves, the surface of the heaps, though not their shape, would eventually have been reclaimed by nature, at no cost at all; a surprising number of trees and shrubs thrive on colliery waste. Or if they had needed petrifying they could, at minimal cost, have been planted with Scots pine - as someone had the intelligent idea of doing around 1950 with two heaps near Byers Green and Westerton, between Bishop and Spennymoor.

Given Durham County Council's environmental and financial record, I sometimes wonder whether it has any contact with reality at all. - T Kelly, Crook.

SOUTH PARK

REGARDING the plans to redevelop South Park (Echo, Jul 24), I am informed that the proposed sporting facilities include five football pitches.

Do we need five more football pitches? Will there be ten lots of goal posts on view in the park, possibly in a conservation area? - M Howe, Darlington.

ADDICTION

ONE wonders if drugs have a detrimental affect on the human brain and common sense is eliminated.

George Best is an intelligent news columnist, a famous international footballer, a rich man with a wonderful wife, who was within a few weeks of dying because his liver was damaged beyond repair due to his alcoholism, when his life was saved by a donated liver.

He then began drinking alcohol again.

People addicted to hard drugs, such as heroin, cocaine etc also tend to destroy lives. The men tend to steal from their own families, burgle houses, attack vulnerable people such as women and old age pensioners to steal their handbags, and women turn to prostitution, all to obtain money for their addiction.

Tobacco addicts know that each time they inhale smoke the cancer products will paint their lungs and will eventually damage them beyond repair. But most of them ignore the fact until they are told by doctors that they only have a short time to live, and that their death will be painful. They know they will damage their children's lungs with passive smoking in their homes; pregnant women are also aware of the damage it can inflict on their unborn child, but it seems to make little difference.

So are addicts' brains affected by drugs? - E Reynolds, Wheatley Hill.