Sir, - Your correspondent, Ted Naisbitt (D&S, April 4) is quite right to praise the speed with which the new national bus passes have been issued. However, your readers need to know the whole picture, since in reality this is little, if anything, to do with Hambleton Council.

Prior to the election of a Labour Government in 1997, Hambleton was the only district council in the country to have no bus pass scheme, preferring instead to use the substantial reserves gained from the sale of its council housing stock to subsidise council tax payers.

To counter this, a number of parish councils in the district established their own bus token schemes for parishioners.

Sowerby Parish Council, at the instigation of its then group of Labour councillors, discussed and seriously considered such a scheme, but was overtaken by events when the new Government made funding available and required Hambleton to introduce local bus passes.

If Hambleton councillors had raised and spent the money in the first place on providing comparable benefits for the local population, instead of making political capital out of claims to be "the lowest council tax area in the country", they would not now be making us face the consequences of their own financial mismanagement which resulted in capping.

STEVE HOYLAND Sowerby, Thirsk.