SIR – After living in St Albans for 33 years I realise that the city has now reached Third World status. I have seen the decline in quality of service to the ratepayer over that period and an increase in the incompetence of the people supposedly providing

SIR - After living in St Albans for 33 years I realise that the city has now reached Third World status.

I have seen the decline in quality of service to the ratepayer over that period and an increase in the incompetence of the people supposedly providing the service.

We have just seen through a Christmas/New Year period with our rubbish bins staring at us outside our house. They were supposed to have been collected on the Thursday before Christmas.

My wife and many of our neighbours phoned up after Christmas and were all given different times when the rubbish would be collected.

Nothing has happened. We are a small road where we take pride in keeping our properties in reasonable order. Smelly rubbish bins sitting outside for 11 days is not something we, or any normal citizen, wants.

They were kept outside as we were not sure what date they would be collected due to totally untrue collection information given to a number of people over a period of a week.

If they knew we were not getting a collection until the New Year, we should have at least had an honest statement.

This, and the lack of gritting of our roads at the beginning of the very cold period and the history of appalling incompetence (for example, the High Street road "improvement" overspend) leads me to my conclusion that we are indeed a Third World City.

JOHN MAGOWAN

Monks Horton Way, St Alban