YOUR correspondent Trevor Pollard ( Letters September 14, 'New system will remain') actually reinforces my point.

When a member of the ferry staff boasts of turning a three to five-minute crossing into a 25 minute round trip that is proof positive the service has declined.

Before the onshore machines, the ferry ran to an informal timetable of every 20 minutes, with time to spare, which meant it could speed up to 15 minutes per return trip at busy times, in order to clear the queue, because when fares were paid on board, loading took just a couple of minutes.

Drivers could simply drive on, pay, drive off and not need to get out of their vehicles - as on every other floating bridge in the country. And this was achieved with just two staff.

Now the ferry does not run to a timetable. It slows down rather than speeds up, at busy times, as Mr Pollard testifies, because loading alone can now take 15 minutes, as the ferry waits for all the passengers to get tickets, onshore. And this reduced service has been operating with five staff - two of them on shore helping passengers extract tickets from the not-fit-for-purpose machines.

The staff are doing their best. It is not their fault. It is the fault of the ill-conceived system imposed on them by the ferry management.

The 'improvements' which Cumbria County Council keeps announcing are no such thing. They are costly efforts to cover up the costly failures of the costly system introduced.

Figures disclosed under a Freedom of Information request show that on Cumbria County Council's watch, net income from the ferry has declined dramatically (from £224,000 in 2012/13 to £65,000 last year) due largely to increased costs. And we haven't yet seen the figures for this year - the first full year of the overmanned new system, which has driven customers away.

CCC says it does not produce monthly profit and loss accounts for the ferry - so we have to wait until well into next year to know how bad the current situation is. What a way to run a business, or rather run it down.

What we ferry users fear is that the next step will be CCC announcing that the ferry is unprofitable and so its running hours will have to be cut. Watch this space.

Alex Brodie

Far Sawrey