This is what you have been writing to us about this week.

To send your own letter, email bfpletters@london.newsquest.co.uk. Please note, any letters sent to the Bucks Free Press office are only being picked up periodically during lockdown.

Councils must step up to the mark

There has been a lot of coverage locally and nationally about the increase in both fly-tipping and littering in public spaces over past months. "Be vigilant on fly-tippers" and "Marlow's litter issues continue" (Marlow Free Press, August 7).

However local councils should acknowledge the part they've played in creating this problem. Witness the exorbitant charges, delays and tedious nitpicking at High Heavens and other waste depots, the removal of all recycling facilities from our town centres, the tiny litter bins provided in our parks, the reduction in the domestic refuse collection service in the first months of the current epidemic.

Packaging is not being meaningfully addressed by our retail chains and the campaign against single use plastic and disposable materials has been necessarily put on hold.

This problem is not going to go away anytime soon and people are not going to radically change their habits in any great numbers when it comes to taking the easy option.

Rubbish collection and disposal is one of the most visible and sensitive core services that the public sector provides in return for our taxes.

Councils need to step up to the mark and put more effort and resources into doing their share.

Geoff Wood, Marlow

Huge thanks to those who helped

Just a little message to give big thanks to various people who helped my mentally ill middle-aged son after he had a stroke this month.

His always patient community psychiatric nurse, Martin, persuaded him to be taken into hospital and then two ambulance crews who joined in.

Then thanks to the stroke unit staff for their care in Wycombe Hospital and Wycombe Central Aid who stepped in quickly providing good as new furniture for my son's flat which had badly worn contents which they removed to scrap.

All involved are local heroes who made my efforts, as an elderly mum, to support my son in his new crisis a lot easier.

Name and address withheld

Scheme is good but work is needed

You recently published an article (Bucks Free Press, August 7, page 9) on a new scheme designed to make access between Chalfont St Peter and Gerrards Cross safer and easier for cyclists and walkers. You spoke to one resident on the Lower Road to gauge his opinion. The gentleman in question is clearly neither a cyclist nor a walker.

As a keen road cyclist and power walker I feel I must give a different opinion.

Firstly, the council have let themselves down dreadfully by a) not counselling local opinion and b) not really thinking it through.

I think the scheme is a great idea and would make good sense if the road surfaces on Lower Road and South Park were resurfaced.

As a walker I take my life in my hands walking along Lower Road on the GX side. There are way more than the ridiculous amount of cars travelling along it than Julian Mason stated (three).

Furthermore very few of the many cars that use it to avoid GX high street do not drive within the 40mph speed limit and with no pavements I only walk it in daylight but never during rush hour/school run times.

As a cyclist I also risk my life as I avoid the many pot holes and uneven surfaces that are on both the proposed roads. As I live on South Park I am aware of them but if an unsuspecting cyclist came whizzing down the hill and hit one of the many bumps, said cyclist would be off in a second.

To sum up, great idea if it’s wanted but repair the two roads to make it even safer and useable.

Sarah Liveing, Gerrards Cross

Is this why we have fly-tipping issues?

RE page two of last week’s Bucks Free Press (‘Be vigilant on fly-tipping’). Does Cllr Bill Chapple OBE, Buckinghamshire Council's Cabinet Member for Environment and Climate Change, think that there could be any possible connection between the increase in fly-tipping and the recent closure of the Recycling Site at Bledlow Ridge?

Or might the increase be due to the removal of local recycling points such as those in and around Princes Risborough?

Or could there perhaps be a link between the reduction in hours at sites such as Aylesbury (now closed two days a week) or the increased charges levied at the Waste Sites lucky enough to survive?

Short term savings lead to longer term financial and environmental costs, Mr Chapple.

Stuart Lindsay, via email

Will we lose our M&S food hall?

What is happening in the food hall in the Eden Centre M&S? I think we could be in danger of losing it altogether.

Are the management at head office running it down so they can close it down?

It was never stocked as well as the Simply Food stores in Loudwater or Princes Risborough but since the lockdown it is a lot worse, two sides of the cold cabinets are not in use so we have lost the stock that in other times would have filled them, what is left is squashed into small areas with not enough space for choice.

There is so much more on offer in the Simply Food stores items we don’t see in the Eden Centre.

I believe their thinking is that there is not enough footfall using it so why fill it, but it is a vicious circle - we won’t use it if the choice is not there!

Stock it like the other stores and customers will come back, at the moment we know we have to go elsewhere to get what we want.

I intend to write to M&S Head Office to complain about the situation if you agree with me please write as well the more of us to complain the more notice I hope they will take.

Sandra Morris, Downley

Club should be proud

The announcement of the closure of the High Wycombe Lions Club is indeed sad news (Bucks Free Press letters page, August 7).

The High Wycombe Community First Responder (CFR) Scheme has been delighted, grateful and humbled to receive support from the Lions during 2019 resulting in the provision of a new response car.

The response car is a great addition to our capabilities and is helping our volunteer CFRs respond quickly to medical emergencies on behalf of South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SCAS) within Wycombe and the surrounding areas.

Our CFRs are volunteers for South Central Ambulance Charity (SCAC) which raises funds to support SCAS.

All the money raised by the charity are used to fund services, projects and equipment that is not supplied by government NHS funding.

CFRs are trained by SCAS staff but are fully funded by the charity.

Responding to emergencies in our communities, CFRs are able to reach the scene and initiate treatment, sometimes life-saving, before the ambulance service.

Like most charities, the events of 2020 have resulted in a reduced ability to raise the funds needed to support our vital work.

However, people are still having accidents of medical emergencies and our CFRs have continued to respond to them throughout the pandemic.

If you would like to find out more or donate to help us continue supporting you when you need it most, please go to scas.charity.

We would like to publicly thank the Wycombe Lions for their generous support and express our sadness at their dissolution.

They should feel immensely proud that their efforts have already made a big difference to those in and around Wycombe in their time of need and will continue to do so for several years.

Robin Mugridge, scheme co-ordinator, High Wycombe Community First Responder Scheme

Pleased to be open once again

Since the government announced that non-essential shops could reopen, Sue Ryder has been planning for a phased return of its charity shops across the UK.

We have been impacted heavily by the coronavirus outbreak over the last four months as not only have our shops been closed but our fundraising events have also been cancelled.

Therefore we are very happy to announce that the Sue Ryder shop in Chesham on the High Street is now open for business Tuesday to Saturday between 10am – 4pm.

We are restricting the number of people in the shop at any one time and installing floor markings to support social distancing. We have also put in place enhanced shop cleaning, which is why we have reduced opening hours.

We have installed acrylic screens at our tills and hand gel stations at the entrance of each shop for customers to use. We have put in place strict procedures for sorting and selling donated stock and have also made the decision to close our changing rooms.

We are now able to take donations and whilst we need your donated goods – the increased safety measures we have put in place means that they will need to be kept in a holding area for 48 hours before being sorted and put on the shop floor. This means that there may be times when the holding area is full and we are unable to accept stock.

We are incredibly grateful for the support and generosity of the local community in Chesham. The success of our shops is paramount to Sue Ryder’s aim, which is to provide compassionate and expert palliative, bereavement and neurological support.

We look forward to welcoming back our customers and donors, old and new and we would like to thank our supporters in advance for their patience and understanding as we try our best to navigate the new environment that we find ourselves operating within.

Heidi Travis, Chief Executive at Sue Ryder

The NHS and data protection

Recently Rory Butler wrote an article here about the removal of safeguards on the sale of the NHS to foreign buyers.

The government has also made it possible for information given by members of the public in confidence to their doctors, to potentially be accessed by commercial AI organisations here and abroad, supposedly as an exceptional response to the “urgent need to bring in additional analytics support to help inform our response to the coronavirus pandemic”.

In May, Faculty, an artificial intelligence firm that worked for Vote Leave was allowed access to social media data, utility bills and credit rating scores as part of a £400,000 contract to help the government deal with the coronavirus pandemic. The contract was awarded directly to Faculty without other firms being given an opportunity to make a competitive bid. The full details of its work for the government are unknown because the published version of the contract was partly redacted, leading to questions from civil liberties groups as to how private companies hired by the government during the pandemic are using confidential data.

In March the government announced it had signed deals with Faculty and Palantir, a US big data firm, linked to the CIA and founded by the right wing billionaire Peter Thiel, to create a giant “COVID-19 datastore” that represents what has been called ‘potentially the largest transfers of patient data to private companies in the history of the NHS’. It has long been alleged that Palantir worked informally with Cambridge Analytica on the Facebook data it harvested in breach of privacy rules (though both companies deny this).

A report in the Guardian this April, based on leaked document, suggested that - although it was anonymised - confidential ‘patient level’, 111 information in the Covid-19 datastore, that may have included people’s gender, postcode, symptoms, the mechanism through which any prescription was dispatched to them, and the precise time they ended the call – were available. (The government also has the means to find the location of calls.)

Another report, in the Observer, this February detailed concerns that the data is not truly “anonymous” - raised by senior NHS officials, who believe the public are not being told the full truth. In the same article Professor Eerke Boiten, director of the Cyber Technology Institute at De Montfort University in Leicester, said: “The answer is no, it is not anonymous…”

Another report in the Guardian, this time in June, said the technology privacy campaign group Foxglove had asked the government for copies of data sharing agreements signed with the companies involved in the government’s “Covid-19 datastore”, in April. Last month the government said it needed more time to decide whether releasing them would unduly damage the companies’ commercial interests. “We haven’t seen the contracts, we haven’t seen the data sharing agreements,” said Cori Crider, the director of Foxglove. “We don’t know what they’re permitted to do with [the data].”

Senior NHS officials have repeatedly claimed: “When the pandemic abates and the outbreak is contained, we will close the Covid-19 datastore.” However, an unnamed ‘Whitehall source’ told the Guardian in April there were lingering concerns in the civil service that the powerful new apparatus could outlast the crisis. If you read the web links above you will see that while Faculty and Palantir both claim to be helping the NHS during the pandemic, they have expressed interest in continuing after the pandemic has ceased. Now it emerges that one of those contracts – between the NHS and Palantir - has leapt from a token £1 to £1 million for a four-month extension. (Palantir is not a charity so why did it originally offer to work for £1?)

This concern seems to have been largely ignored by Conservative newspapers and the sources I have quoted are only a selection.

If you are worried that a government led by Boris Johnson under the mentorship of Dominic Cummings might tell a lie and would sell the NHS to US insurance companies despite protestations to the contrary, and if you object to your medical history being available to youthful marketing executives in California, it is possible to opt out of some data sharing at least by going to https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/manage-your-choice/

Lawrence Linehan, Wooburn Green