MADAM - I read your piece in this week's Shuttle.

Wyre Forest falls short on electric charging points

We do need clean air, our children especially and electric cars will help that. As for the source of the electricity well we have to hope for the best.

I agree there needs to be more chargers, although at this point it would appear there needs to be more electric cars to benefit from them!

My concern, as a holder of a blue badge is that these chargers should not be placed in blue badge parking spaces. We need the extra room by our cars for wheelchairs (and sometimes just for stiff joints to cope). I fail to see why electric cars need the extra space or the places closest to the entrance to shops or facilities. It may have to do with cable length but you see my point.

Blue badge drivers need the closer, wider spaces. Motorway services are bad at this. They allow the places to be taken by the chargers and when one of us draws their attention to this they reply that they have put new spaces in for us. So they have - further away and in places more vulnerable to passing traffic. No joke when someone is getting a wheelchair out of the back of a car. or someone has to 'walk' the extra distance.

I tried to get attention to this two years ago and was ignored by the very best people. Particularly politicians who are supposed to have our best interests at heart. The truth is, very few people with the power to do something for us is interested in doing so. We are not vote getters obviously.

I am a member of a Facebook group for disabled people (drivers in particular) and what some have to put up with from the public at large beggars belief. There are more of us getting about, thanks to facilities put in place (by law) but it does appear to us that if these laws can be quietly circumvented that is what will happen.

Please keep your eyes open for us.

Good luck on the electric car chargers.

Regards

Norma Corbett

Kidderminster