Who authorised the police to stop rural animal-feed delivery lorries?
sir – We are a business that is carrying on during the current events. We supply animal feed. We get daily deliveries by large commercial vehicles.
Suddenly, yesterday, drivers of two vehicles said they had been stopped on the road by police inquiring about their business. This is a waste of resources and unacceptable to me.
What is going on, who authorised this and why? Reginald Chester-sterne
Beaulieu, Hampshire
sir – Getting some exercise in the fresh air is allowed under coronavirus restrictions and is important for both physical and mental health.
Government advice to the BBC is that making a journey (by car) to do so is permissible, as long as rules on social distancing and the size of groups are followed.
However, some police forces have decided to ban such journeys. Derbyshire police have castigated people walking in pairs in the Peak
District. But Staffordshire police, who also cover the Peak District, are complaining that people are exercising in the town of Tamworth, instead of going into the countryside where there is more room.
This epidemic is limiting very basic freedoms and the vast majority of us accept this. But such curtailment of individual liberty needs to be by transparent rules, not by the grace and favour of individual chief constables. Pete Dean
Formby, Lancashire
sir – The police really do have a remarkable talent for directing their scarce resources in the wrong direction.
If you drive to a deserted spot and walk your dog – alone – you are no danger to yourself or others. Anthony Whitehead
Bristol
sir – Police fly drones over lone self-isolating walkers in Derbyshire, while planes from all parts of the world continue to arrive in the UK and passengers are not screened for virus symptoms or monitored in their subsequent isolation. James Thacker
Tanworth-in-arden, Warwickshire
sir – Are we to believe that the chief constable of Derbyshire is a reincarnation of Warden Hodges from Dad’s Army? Dr Robert Walker
Workington, Cumbria
sir – Helen Wynne-griffith (Letters, March 27) suggests that to ease the social-distancing dance on the pavement, we should all walk on the right.
It would be preferable to revert to the sensible old convention that people facing the traffic should walk on the outside of the pavement, where they can see what’s coming, while those walking in the same direction as the traffic should walk on the inside. Sir Harold Walker
London SW14