The plan to have cabbies train up as "ambassadors" for Bradford is certainly to be welcomed.

If cab drivers are the first people that visitors to the city meet, when they alight from trains or buses and need to move on to other areas in the district, then it makes sense for those drivers to be smart, well-informed and able and willing to talk up the city and surrounding areas.

It's a good move from Bradford Breakthrough to train up these drivers, and might well improve a visitor's first impressions of Bradford if they climb into a cab immediately upon arriving here.

But why stop there? Ambassadors, by their very definition, do not merely sit on their home territory but go out into the wider world to represent their turf to other people.

One of Bradford's problems is that some sectors of the community are very good at talking down their home, which does not do much for public relations.

If we really want to change some of the misguided and often wrong-headed views that people from outside of Bradford hold about the city and the district, we need to take the message direct to them.

Those of us who go out into the wider world need to talk up Bradford at every opportunity, to sing its praises and highlight everything that is good about living here.

We might have our problems, but then so do most other places. The trick is to, in the words of the old song, accentuate the positive, and slowly change people's perceptions of what Bradford is all about.

That we we can all be ambassadors for our district, wherever we go.