SIR – I note with interest that work has started in Halifax on the £50 million redevelopment of Broad Street in the town centre. Meanwhile, even though the recession put the project on hold for 18 months, work is due to start on the £350 million Trinity Quarter shopping centre in Leeds with the accompanying headline in the local evening paper proclaiming: “Phew! Leeds isn’t Bradford.”

And that, I’m afraid, sums Bradford up.

The T&A is reduced to reporting – and trying to make it sound like some sort of positive development – that the desolation that should be the Westfield shopping centre development in the city centre has been “grassed over”.

Is it not about time that the long-suffering council tax payer received an adequate explanation from those responsible for ensuring that Bradford has become a national laughing stock and byword for incompetence?

Even better, how about letting us know when work is going to start on making Bradford what it should be – one of the great cities of this country?

Martin Green, Santa Monica Road, Bradford