It is many years since councillors could be classed as volunteers, and, as a new councillor, Anna Semlyen perhaps knows less about volunteering than I do (Letter, July 1).

Volunteers have no legal status, and City of York Council has no policy for their protection.

Those who recruit volunteers are careful of their own statutory rights, but indifferent to the fate of those they are paid to persuade to work for nothing.

Past experience has shown that this indifference is shared by themajority of Anna Semlyen’s colleagues. It is surely a shameful injustice that volunteers, unlike paid workers, have no right of appeal in cases of dispute, and are specifically excluded from the protection (such as it is) of the Local Government Ombudsman.

In my view our chief executive is aware of this, yet continues to allow it to be supposed otherwise in documentation and on the council website.

If Coun Semlyen is concerned about York volunteers, or simply about accurate reporting, she might begin by having these errors rectified.

William Dixon Smith, Welland Rise, Acomb, York.