SIR - The impact of the Disability Discrimination Act has been known about for years - deliberately so to allow affected businesses and utilities to plan to meet it.

Three years ago, as part of ongoing improvement work, we installed the necessary ramps and disabled toilet facilities at our hotel to comply with the Act. Many other businesses have done the same. Unfortunately many have not and will no doubt now whinge about the costs.

For Bradford Council not to have built the necessary allowances into plans and budgets to meet the Act is nothing short of scandalous. Do not blame the Act. The fault lies clearly, yet again, with inefficient and inept council officers and management.

No doubt the funds that would have been generated by a successful Capital Of Culture bid would have been earmarked to pay for proper facilities. All over Europe clean, attended public conveniences have disabled facilities. In Bradford and district you use an alleyway.

Never mind, those who are responsible for another fiasco probably have the key to the City Hall toilets!

William Oxley, Beck Lane, Bingley.

SIR - Once again I am impressed by the Council's logic: if toilets cannot be adapted for use by disabled people then they should not be available for anyone to use. In other words rather than discriminate against one group of people let's discriminate against everyone.

Somehow this makes sense to the Council but then the Council has its own form of logic which is alien to that of most normal people.

If Education Bradford (aka Serco, a private supplier) fails to provide what it has promised, the Council pays Serco more money. The Council always seems to be able to find substantial sums of money to pay consultants to do the job for which the Council's senior management are already being paid very large salaries. This must also be logical to the Council.

The only inescapable logic is that which dictates that Council Tax must rise to pay for these follies.

K J Trocki, Birchdale, Bingley.

SIR - So Margaret Eaton has found another excuse to destroy the facilities offered by her incompetent administration.

It isn't quite the truth that the Disability Discrimination Act requires the toilets to be closed since it only requires "reasonable adjustments" to overcome physical barriers to access.

By no stretch of the imagination is a cost of £100,000 reasonable, particularly when it will benefit the sort of people who routinely park on double yellow lines immediately next to a junction because they have a disabled sticker and they believe this allows them to obstruct the public.

This pandering to the disabled at the expense of the able-bodied is ludicrous, I agree, but it is wrong to blame this legislation for the Council's decision to close the toilets rather than be brave and make a stand that £100,000 is totally unreasonable.

David Simpson, Hirst Avenue, Heckmondwike.

SIR - It is difficult to disagree with the arguments (T&A, August 8) which David Mallen, chairman of Bradford's Education Policy Partnership, has used to defend their language policy.

However, the question about the use of South Asian languages in Bradford's inner-city schools must be discussed in view of the reality of the current situation. At least one third of the children enter these schools with no English at all.

Most of these schools have a heavy concentration of children of the same linguistic, religious, cultural and social background. A majority of minority ethnic background children are under-achievers in education and employment.

Schools can build on children's home language only if there are adequate numbers of formally-trained teachers from similar language backgrounds in these schools.

To some extent the forced use of English language in the classroom and playground would be desirable to speed up the learning of it. Only the people educated in the Indian sub-continent can say with confidence if the proficiency in Punjabi or Urdu automatically enhances children's proficiency in English.

Children from some minority ethnic groups have excelled in education and in careers even compared with local white children. There must be something to learn from their educational experience and the attitude towards the use of English in the family and their community set-ups.

Ramindar Singh, Chatsworth Road, Pudsey.

SIR - When Tony Blair said he wanted all the population computer literate and backed it up with UK Online I was the first to appreciate his idea.

After all the World Wide Web is the best library ever invented and encouraging people to glean from it is commendable. However, there is the problem of junk mail, which is choking the system and is not being addressed.

I recently received an important email, which arrived three months late due to junk mail. I normally delete all junk (bulk) mail before looking at it, because a large percentage is sexual-orientated gobbledegook.

For those people who have not yet used an e-mail address, here are some examples from my daily rubbish pile of around 75 e-mails: "Enhance your love life", "Choose a partner from lovely Russian girls", "Add inches to your manhood", "Do-it-yourself vasectomy". The mind boggles with regard to the last one.

Come on Tony, are you going to protect the public from this utter rubbish or do your usual impression of a damp squib?

Trevor Williams-Berry, Bredon Avenue, Wrose.

SIR - I would like to thank Mr Suchi for his comments regarding the dangers of genetic contamination in agrobiology. He is right to say that the field trials that took place were small and of very little significance to the overall test results.

My main concern was the 240,000 farms that were contaminated by using conventional seeds mixed with genetically-manipulated seeds in the year 2000. Nobody knows where the contamination starts and where it ends.

The main problem is that the crops have and still are being sprayed with pesticide.

The conventional plant with no genetic manipulation in it will accept the pesticide as normal - no problem. The genetic-manipulated plant which has a built-in defence system to neutralise predators will have its genetic values altered as the sprayed pesticide from outside the plant clashes with the genetic implants induced by the biothesists from the inside.

Then there is the cross-cultured plant (part genetic and part conventional). This will have the biggest problem of all as various forces take place.

Genes are the most powerful phenomenon in existence and wrong combinations can be devastating when tampering is concerned. After all this is life's basic food we are talking about.

Derek Wright, Westbury Street, Bradford 4.

SIR - It would seem to me that Bradford Council have done a discount deal on a bulk purchase of traffic lights.

My route to work has recently seen the erection of three new sets of lights, all in a ten-minute journey. And they all, without fail, have increased queuing traffic and slowed the general flow of the cars. None of the junctions have been improved.

It seems we are wasting taxpayers' money on ill-conceived and poorly-planned traffic-light installations.

Mark Britton, Leeds Road, Thackley.