Madam, As local County Councillors we feel compelled to write to you after Mr Dazeley's letter of a fortnight ago.

The point that we wish to convey is that we are on your side, we are as frustrated as you are and sadly knowing that we should not have to, we send reminders again and again and make many phone calls, send numerous emails and have lots of meetings to discuss these issues and incomplete jobs.

We take every opportunity, including our locality meetings and even taking the Chief Executive of Herefordshire Council on an extremely lengthy tour of Ross, to highlight these issues.

We manage to still get a lot done and have good results and in a lot of cases we are impressed with the service that we receive from Amey but we struggle with the inconsistency that we receive and how long we are often left waiting.

We are aware that Herefordshire Council will be putting this contract out to tender in the near future and we hope that this will give the opportunity to make the necessary improvements.

There is no easy solution for this problem and we certainly, as County Councillors, do not have the power to get these jobs completed and are just choosing not to. Mr Dazeley stated that "the councillors do not seem to effectively manage their contractors," sadly the reality is that we do not get the opportunity to manage "our" contractors, what we do is get the jobs logged for inspection and trawl through every single one chasing a progress report very regularly until it is done.

It should not have to be this way, but it is this way, we are fighting to change it and in the meanwhile we make the best of the cards we were dealt. We can only apologise for delays or an incomplete task but we share every bit of that frustration.

Cllrs Andrew Atkinson and

Phil Cutter,

Ross-on-Wye East Ward