Babergh leader John Ward has responded angrily to Hadleigh Nub News columnist Rowland Taylor's Ghost after being criticised for gesture politics.

Dear Editor

I always look forward to the musings of Rowland Taylor's Ghost because he is eloquent, entertaining and amusing. However, his normal style has eluded him this week in what was a churlish and sarcastic attack on Babergh over our Ukraine response.

The motion we passed expressing our disgust at what Russia is doing is a standard one that councils up and down the country are debating. It may not, in itself, achieve anything but it sets the context for our actual responses, which, for a district council, are to provide support to our residents who are participating in the Home for Ukraine scheme, assess accommodation being offered for suitability and also help refugees with access to work and benefits. We are liaising closely with the county council who will be providing other support services and education places. We are, unfortunately, being hampered by incomplete data on arrivals under Homes for Ukraine, and none at all on those arriving through the family visa scheme.

Demand for our own housing stock is high: we have very few empty properties at any given time and these are almost exclusively those that are undergoing renovations prior to being relet to applicants waiting on our housing list. We did let two properties to Afghan refugees last year and we will of course do all we can to help Ukrainians and will step in to prevent anyone becoming homeless.

The allegations that we spend time and money on issues outside our control, misuse powers within our control and fail to plan for the services we have to deliver are baseless and offensive. I would love to see the ghost's evidence, but I won't hold my breath. It's easy to take cheap pot-shots at councils in order to malign and slur, hoping that over time people will believe, but not so easy to do the research to find out what we are doing and then, perhaps, engage in constructive criticism where we might fall short. I am, however, at a loss to understand why he would take pleasure in a nihilistic trashing of our democratic institutions; that's not healthy.

I can only assume that the spectre's usual sense of humour has been put under stress by a determined team of local ghostbusters who will soon get him into a containment unit or, better still, banish him to another dimension.

Regards