SIR – So let me get this right.

At a time when our apparently-embattled police force is straining against unprecedented cuts to its budget, telling all and sundry that these cuts will put our very lives at extreme and imminent danger, they see fit to employ staff up to the rank of inspector to persecute the respectable motorists of Ilkley, on the grounds that some of them take an eminently sensible line across a bizarre little fried-egg roundabout-substitute.

At the same time, drug, gun and car-crime is rife in other parts of their bailiwick, yet this is allowed to continue unabated, probably because those miscreants are just a tad harder to identify, tend to complain when challenged and are less likely to be wholly legitimate in their public demeanour than the good folk of Ilkley.

So next time we read of our esteemed Chief Constable whinging about any lack of resources to fight serious crime, those of us who pay his inflated salary will know how to respond.

The sooner we get an independent elected Police Commissioner to knock some common sense and realism into these self-important, uniformed jobsworths the better.

Graham Hoyle, Kirkbourne Grove, Baildon