Sir, – Following various articles on market stalls in your paper, could I clear the confusion up?

The council may be justified in not providing stalls any more and saving money. It also may have made a short-sighted mistake.

This is not a problem now, we have resigned to accept it anyway.

The problem that our elected councillors, representing traders and public, have is that the people making these changes did not discuss it with traders, as they keep suggesting.

It simply is not true, we have had no meeting. We have had a traders’ committee for many years and I as chairman have tried to get a meeting many times, as in years gone by when a good relationship existed. We have now had no response, not just on this but other issues as well.

I repeat, there have been no meetings about this and no discussion.

I would know.

Elected local councillors should be very worried. It may be the right decision the council has made, it’s too early to say.

But we were not consulted.

GORDON DRAPER Chairman, Hambleton and the Dales Traders Committee.