The headline to Mr Paterson's letter "Council pays Lip Service to Public Consultation" - needs challenging. (Letters, April 30).

City of York Council undertakes a substantial amount of consultation work, through opinion polls, residents' panels, meetings, and so on, in line with our commitment to being a listening council. The majority Labour Group and our officers do take the results very seriously and we reflect those in the decision we take as far as we reasonably can. If you actually look at the record dispassionately you will see that - whether it's in our budget priorities (set after our main annual resident opinion survey) or in decisions on many specific schemes or proposals.

The Northern Gateway proposal, to which Mr Paterson refers, was one such example.

The question was asked in the 1997 annual Residents' Opinion "Do residents think that the proposed Park & Ride development should be located at the Northern Gateway site?"

The result, based on a statistically representative sample of 1,200 York residents, (which gives an expected accuracy of +/- 2.8 per cent), with the interviews conducted independently of the Council, was two to one in favour of the Northern Gateway site from those expressing an opinion either way. This broadly matched the response to the separately distributed leaflet detailing both the Northern Gateway site and other alternatives that had been examined/suggested, where again the Northern Gateway site received easily the greatest support.

Dave Merrett,

Deputy Leader of the Council,

Guildhall,

York.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.