WITH regard to Janet Sanderson’s letter (Gazette & Herald, February 12), Thornton Internal Drainage Board (IDB) and their expertise of many decades should not be completely lost, but will be amalgamated with the Rye and Muston and Yedingham IDB’s to form one large Vale of PickeringIDB.

Their job and how they carry it out will not change and, theoretically, they should benefit from economies of scale.

The role of IDB’s is to maintain the smaller watercourses and drainage channels in the vale.

As these all discharge water into the main rivers, about 14.5 per cent of their total income (from local taxpayers) is passed directly to the Environment Agency (EA) as a contribution towards their maintenance of main rivers in order to effectively pass this water down the system.

Not unreasonably, and with more major cuts to the Environment Agency imminent, the IDB’s feel they could spend that money far more effectively themselves and have the local knowledge and expertise to do so.

The vexed subject of dredging has been a hot topic lately. Any true expert will tell you that this is by no means as simple as it would first appear and that dredging can be costly and of very limited benefit.

However, like the Somerset levels, the Vale of Pickering is really a network of engineered and managed drainage channels.

As such, it will always need a degree of maintenance (targeted dredging, vegetation and weed cutting, hardware) to avoid frequent low level flooding - dredging has a negligible effect on major flood events as the sediment is such a small percentage of the vast quantity of flood water.

I’m not aware of any evidence to show the tipping point at which economies of scale turn to a bloated leviathan, heavily centralised, office based and increasingly remote from colloquially named places and hardwon local knowledge.

Let’s face it, who could possibly accuse the Environment Agency (and other government leviathans) of having a surfeit of well-paid graduate Chiefs and a dearth of hard-pressed Indians, relearning the lost skills of horse riding and with a million pound feasibility study for sourcing bows and arrows.

Mike Potter, Ryedale Flood Research Group, Pickering