A BARRHEAD councillor has slammed plans to keep one of the town’s busiest roads closed for the next 18 months. Paul Aitken says he was shocked to discover a key section of Springfield Road is to be shut to drivers until the autumn of 2022. East Renfrewshire Council had announced in December that part of Springfield Road between Barrhead and Neilston, including the Five Ways roundabout, would be closed for 28 weeks from January. This was to allow an upgrade as part of a major 316 housing development by Taylor Wimpey. Now the council has told elected officials that the restrictions on cars, lorries and vans is to be extended until the latter part of next year.
Breakfast Trolley AN innovative project offering pupils in Scotland the chance to pick up a free breakfast from a mobile cart is to be extended to other UK schools following a successful pilot. The ‘grab-n-go’ scheme is based on a similar model used in the US and Canada and gives pupils easy access to nutritious food before class. During the pilot, every pupil in two primaries and a secondary school in East Renfrewshire had access to free cereal, toast, and fruit. Researchers from Glasgow Caledonian University surveyed almost 500 pupils and 39 teachers during an initial trial in Barrhead and found many children skipped breakfast completely before school.
YOUR correspondent alludes to the failure to track and test those who have been obliged to self-isolate on arrival from abroad (“Confusion over the quarantine rules”, letters, February 12). Unfortunately, the latest mandatory hotel isolation requirements do not resolve these concerns. Indeed, they beg the question as to whether the new arrangements risk contagion in cramped, airless, air-conditioned environments as opposed to managed self-isolation at a nominated safe address. The new regulations effectively punish individuals financially and emotionally – £1,700 in exchange for 10-day incarceration – due to the failure of the Government to effectively apply their formal stated policy in relation to tracking and testing, which is central to the success of self-isolation.
I didn’t want to complain - I just wanted to get my Mum’s vaccination sorted out. “The final irony was that the number they’d given me for a complaint was no longer operable because their resources ‘had been transferred to the Covid helpline’. It’s all a bit Kafkaesque.” Mr Barham was particularly worried as his mother had nearly died due to sepsis last year and is visited by four carers each day at her home in Renfrew, increasing the risk of infection.
Housebound Barbara Barham, 97, from Renfrew was vaccinated yesterday after her case was raised with the health board