Letters: Residents' needs taking second place to tourists

Last week the Evening News announced measures drafted by the city council to reverse 'the decline of the Old and New Towns' of Edinburgh ('˜Plan to give city heritage site a new lease of life', March 24).

Council plans to listen to locals are at odds with developments. Picture; Ian Georgeson

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These measures include “visitor management and influence and sense of control.”

This announcement came hard on the heels of an item about the same city council handing over the management of the Capital’s Hogmanay celebrations to Underbelly, whose jubilant bosses proclaimed that they “couldn’t be more excited”, and that their “hugely ambitious” plans “will see an expansion and growth of Edinburgh’s winter festivals” (‘War of words as Hogmanay organisers ditched for Underbelly’, March 23).

Spot the inconsistency. Spot the grating disconnect.

Are Edinburgh residents really to be given “influence and a sense of control” over the spread of tacky tourist-oriented “festivities” across more and more of the city and for longer and longer each year?

Not likely. Not as long as a feeble, vision-free council is so pathetically willing to hand over our home to shiny entrepreneurs like Underbelly whose ambition seems to be to make Edinburgh - as one columnist memorably put it - the Duracell bunny of the city-break circuit.

DJ Young, India Street, Edinburgh