Open letter to our representatives

Two public exhibitions, lasting 12 hours, held in Culross and Grangemouth between 1 and 7pm on 4 and 5 June when most of the concerned community are either at work or collecting children from school. One in a venue where public transport, Culross, is very poor - making if difficult for interested communities to get to at least one exhibition.

Only one thing is certain, that the reason for the exhibition is to get public support for Cluff Natural Resources PLC, in case Fife, Falkirk and other local authorities reject Cluff Natural Resources formal planning application in the way that local authorities rejected Dart Energy’s application to frack.

What is reasonably certain is that Cluff Natural Resources will not publish the following: I believe the company’s technology can cause an overburden fracture, a crack in the layers of rock and soil that sit above the coal seam, which in some cases can lead to the escape of gases into the air or allow ground water into the cavity created.

Underground gasification is a controversial technique involving lighting coal on fire underground, injection of oxygen and water into cavities in a coal seam to produce gas to generate power. Indeed, it could be argued that underground coal gasification is “a monster in the making” that exposes the environment to unnecessary harm and taxpayers to huge liabilities if things go wrong.

Cluff Natural Resources have a licence area, issued through the previous coalition government, of 3,687 hectares in the Kincardine Project Area, located in the Firth of Forth, where there is a resource of 335 million tonnes of coal of which 247 million tonnes is measured and indicated. What happens if there is an overburden fracture under the mud flats at Kincardine? How much employment will Cluff operations create in the area for the unemployed? - Yours etc., John Mitchell Tullibody What's happening?

Sir, - I recently drew attention to the renewable companies industrialising our bonny Ochil Hills.

There has been a definitive “creep” wherever there is easy access. The swathe that has been cut through the woods on the southern slopes, to accommodate the super pylons, is bad enough, but that is nothing to what you find when you get up there.

An access road from the A9 for heavy plant. Fences everywhere and metal gates at the start of the Dumyat trail. Red warning signs , something I never dreamed I would ever see on what was once an open wild countryside. Even a T junction with white lines, the lot.

I climbed up where a path used to be, but now obliterated, the trees and bushes gone. The wee spring halfway up that used to gurgle away, crystal clear, now a muddy quagmire .

How I wished that Fergus Ewing, the Energy Minister in the Scottish Government, could have stood beside me, and seen what his ‘green crusade’ has done, to what was once a beautiful place, where you could have been as one with nature.

Scotland is paying a heavy price, for what purpose? A country that exports electricity and has, reportedly, reached its renewable targets.

Why else would we have a surplus? Time for the leader of the ‘green crusade’ to think again. Time to consider the recent report, that our country is the least wooded country in Europe ( 18 per cent) and has failed, miserably, to achieve the projected aim to increase our wooded areas. Time for Fergus to doff his hat. - Yours etc., Bob Cuthbert Alloa So proud of my dad Sir, - My name is Scott, from Sheffield, and my dad lives in Alloa.

Eleven months ago he got a blood clot in his spine and ended up in intensive care for some time.

We got told he wouldn’t last that long but he kept going. Then we got told he wouldn’t be home for Christmas, but was getting wheeled around Blackpool by the October holidays.

We were then told he may never walk again and few months ago he put a video on Facebook of him riding a bike.

So I wanted to let him know how much I love him and so glad he’s a fighter. I’m unemployed at the moment so it’s hard but I’m trying to get up there to be with him for Father’s Day with my son.

He has also gone through all this knowing he had to go through chemotherapy for a cancerous lump in his neck.

I don’t know what you can do but as I write this I have tears down my cheeks, tears of joy.

I really hope you can help by printing this and also thank the nurses at Falkirk hospital. - Yours etc., Scott McManus Everyone should have the option Sir, - There are more than six million carers in the UK, doing an amazing job after finding themselves in the position of caring for someone who may be older, disabled or seriously ill.

Whether your caring role comes as a surprise or whether the needs of the person you care for have changed, carers often have to pick up the household’s financial management at little notice. This is hard enough, but without a paper trail, it is nigh on impossible.

Until relatively recently someone taking on a caring role could run somebody else’s finances pretty straightforwardly, with the appropriate authorisations.

Even if you were caring for someone whose filing system wasn’t up to scratch, you could gauge the state of accounts pretty clearly from the regular paperwork that companies were sending out.

But the last decade has seen a wholesale change in how service providers communicate. Banks have relentlessly advocated switching people to online accounts, sometimes automatically. Energy companies lure people in with the promise of lower bills if they don’t have to send out a paper copy.

When you’re caring for someone, the last thing you need is additional complications - or worse, the thought of having services cut off if you don’t pay the bill that you now can’t readily access. And nobody wants to be quizzing a frail or sick dependent about their passwords and service providers.

The Keep Me Posted campaign, which is supported by Carers UK, wants everyone to have the choice to receive bills and statements on paper if that’s what they prefer. As Carers Week marks the excellent, usually unseen and unsung work, that carers provide, surely giving people that choice is something that makes sense. - Yours etc., Judith Donovan CBE Chair Keep Me Posted