YEP Letters: August 27

Offer some advice on food spending?

MP Ward, Rothwell

Can I suggest when people come to food banks there may be someone who could advise them on how to spend their benefits or go with them to the local supermarket?

It is far cheaper to cook your own food and not go to the takeaway.

Supermarkets are very cost effective when you buy a bag of potatoes, vegetables, meat etc. The potatoes and vegetables left over will last many days and go towards making another meal.

Maybe in today’s age it is very easy to let someone else do the cooking. Maybe no one has shown them how.

I have tried to be positive with some ideas I have thought for sometime.

Inmates share one person cells at Leeds prison

Overcrowding at Leeds Prison is forcing prisoners to share cells - eating and sleeping and even using the toilet in spaces designed for one. The latest Ministry of Justice figures show that 1022 prisoners were crammed into just 669 spaces at the prison in July. Campaigners say that the unchecked rise of the prison population is responsible for the huge increase in assaults on staff and other inmates culminating in the Government taking over HMP Birmingham from its contractor - G4S - after a damning inspection report. One of the Government’s first actions was to move hundreds of inmates to other jails reducing the overcrowding. According to July’s figures Leeds Prison is more overcrowded than Birmingham.We asked YEP readers for their views and here’s what some of them said on social media...

Cherril Cliff

And a shocking shortage of staff, that allows inmates to get drugs and trade drugs. The Government have cut prison budgets to the bone and they have become breeding grounds for unrest and violence.

Kaytee Gigantor Beardsmore

The crux of this article isn’t the impact on the prisoners per se but more on the safety of and violence inflicted on the prison staff who cannot manage the prisoners at the current levels.

Stephanie Louise

Feel the need to raise a few points. 1: Leeds is a remand prison so there are many people there who have not actually been found guilty of any crime. 2: could happen to anyone, 3: this country incarcerates far higher numbers of people for minor crime than many others across Europe so the prisons are unnecessarily overcrowded. 4: many young men who end up in the criminal justice system have mental health problems and learning disabilities, often undiagnosed and untreated and are left very vulnerable. And finally people have to work in this environment.

What about the impact on staff?

Rise in assaults on staff and prisoner on prisoner violence that staff have to deal with. It’s just not cut and dried at all.

Barbara Thompson

Good that’s what’s prisons for. We should take a leaf out of America’s prisons.

They no how to punish we are far too soft.

Sharon Wright

My heart bleeds for them. But if they were decent people who didn’t offend then they wouldn’t be in there.

Simple as don’t do the crime you’ll not be doing the time.

Ben Butterfield

It’s not meant to be a holiday camp. If we have more criminals than space , hard luck.

Debbie Spencer

They get better amenities than our OAPs get in a home, it costs more to keep them in prison.

Carol Thompson

Should have behaved in first place, we never read the reports of the poor victims lives ruined by the scroats that have caused their misery.

Angela Daley

If they didn’t break the law they wouldn’t have to share. It’s supposed to be punishment not a hotel.

Suzanne Bre

Can’t do the time don’t do the crime , at least they are warm and fed , unlike some of our OAPs.

Denise Akalach

Lucky they are not in some other countries, they would see real misery in some of those prisons. They have done the crime so tough, no sympathy.

Sad to see bargains disappear

John D Burton, by email.

I AM very sorry to hear the doors of Normanton-based Poundworld could close for good.

While Woolworths vanished from Britain’s high streets in 2008, anyone who has watched the TV fly-on-the-wall documentaries which followed Poundworld’s founder Chris Edwards as he built the business into a success story, will have seen the reasons why it grew so rapidly to employing 4,000 people nationally before being sold to TPG Capital for £150m in 2015.

The reasons are simple and straightforward. It’s a cliché and a truism – “great retail is about detail” – and Chris Edwards remains a master at the art of fleet-of-foot retailing.

Poundworld offered incredible value to its customers as it brought in goods from overseas which sold alongside other products from manufacturers struggling with debts to meet, and warehouses full of stock they were anxious to shift.

The result? Poundworld’s customers won out massively at the hands of a retailer who had first learnt his craft in Wakefield market alongside his inspirational parents.

I only hope Chris Edwards, or another Yorkshire business person, will emerge to build a retailing operation as successful as Poundworld was.

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