WELL done Joe Anderson and all involved in rejecting the proposed tunnel increase last week.

But the issues remain … in the course of work, I regularly use Conwy, Penmaenbach and Pen-y-clip tunnels on the A55 which are fast, well-lit and efficient-a motorway standard two-lane road goes through them with no delays, no tolls and without need of a dedicated police resource.

By contrast, the Mersey Tunnels are an expensive, gloomy anachronism, utterly unsuited to 21st Century traffic requirements, and which were supposed to have paid for themselves decades ago.

Usage between the two is estimated to be around 30m journeys per year, so the income must be upwards of £45m per year.

Spent on what? Up to date payment collection? Nice bright lighting?

No evidence of either of those.

Neither do the tunnels need a special police force, because if you do away with tolls, you do away with tollbooths, and you can have (in the case of the Wallasey Tunnel) a two-lane motorway approach, two-lane tunnel, wide, efficient exit slip roads in Liverpool, and you won’t need yellow jackets shuffling vast quantities of cones all day.

I'm sure there will be many reasons why North Wales can afford to fund its tunnels and their maintenance and Wirral can't, but the fact remains, we in Wirral are still paying for facilities which opened in the 1930s and the 1970s.

Phil Thomas, Heswall.