I LIVE at the top of Victoria Road in Richmond in a dwelling which was formerly a shop and house combined.

To the rear runs a lane which originally connected Victoria Road with the Nuns Close Car Park.

From time immemorial, this lane has been used by a modest amount of residential and, for the shop, commercial traffic. For at least 30 years, it has also counted among its regular foot users the local ward councillor, Linda Curran.

Earlier this year, Richmondshire council caused the lane to be closed to vehicular traffic by the erection of a set of bollards.

The only person seriously impeded by this is myself. I have no car, but free access to the rear of my house is imperative, not only for workmen attending to its fabric and for the future possible operation of the shop, but also for professional visitors including van drivers from the University of Newcastle to which I am donating some 20,000 books.

The council’s action raises the more fundamental issue of the uninhibited power of unelected public servants.

When these servants were questioned as to the reasons for their action they asserted that there was a danger to pedestrians when drivers into the lane might reverse out into the highway. When further questioned as to the evidence for such accidents occurring over, say, the last 50 years, none could be cited.

When it was then pointed out that such lack of evidence hardly justified the exercise of force majeure, Cllr Curran joined the officials’ bland answer that an accident might happen.

Very well. If that is an acceptable reason (though it is hardly a reason at all) then logic demands that it is applied consistently. An analysis must be made of all the local areas where pedestrians may be, however slightly, endangered by reversing drivers and then bollards must be erected to prevent it.

A good example is the council’s pay-and-display car park on the south side of Victoria Road where cars regularly drive in to park and then reverse out across a very busy footway. Or Darlington Road where at 8am the cars reverse from the houses as children are going to school. Bollard the lot of them!

By regarding such suggestions as frivolous, the council tacitly admits that it is easy to abridge the historic rights of one or two ratepayers while ignoring the corollary that what “might happen” in this lane might just as easily happen in a dozen other locations too.

Amid all their current claims of financial hardship, the councillors have spent nigh on £2,000 of ratepayers’ money on this irrational exercise.

Brian Alderson, Richmond