Dear Councillor Pervez,
Thanks for your reply in particular regarding your strategy for creating the right conditions for jobs and growth in the city. I totally support any strategy that will create jobs and growth and bring prosperity back to this city as I’m sure that other protesters will echo.

Successive Labour led councils and inadequate Officers have, through their ill-conceived plans, reduced our future generations’ prospects to greater deprivation and poverty. Education standards and attainment fall well below regional and national averages and I know that education drives aspiration and ambition. In addition your strategy will encumber this generation even further by attracting thousands of minimum paid jobs in the retail and service sectors so they will be faced with a lifetime of worry because they are in jobs that attract in-work benefits and leave them with very little discretionary disposable income. You will also add to their burden by saddling them with a debt for a move that 90% of the people of this city have shown that they don’t support or need. That’s what your opinion and strategy will give our future generation.

My opinion and strategy is based on the fact that I know the conditions for growth and job creation already exist. I know that our economy is built upon the efforts and entrepreneurship of small to medium enterprises. Just look in the Yellow Pages and let this guide you. You could contact every business in the SIX TOWNS and ask them what it would take for them to employ just one extra member of staff, particularly from the young and elderly unemployed. You could then give them the conditions for doing that. You could do that tomorrow and would see the fruits of these efforts in a very short time. You don’t have to build a Central Business District taking years, build on what exists.

I am sure that my strategy would not cost anywhere near the figures I hear quoted for the move of the civic centre and would benefit the city AS A WHOLE and not just one part of it. What is the point of an attractive retail centre when you have to pass through five ghettos to get to it?

Finally, and like many others, I will oppose you or anyone I feel is not doing their job of representing the people they were elected to serve so I suppose that takes care of some of my plans until 2015.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Lear