Comments are currently post-moderated which means they will automatically appear on the site after they are submitted. However comments which are offensive or legally questionable will be removed.

As a general guideline, comments which make reasoned criticism will be allowed to remain on the site. But comments which contain gratuitous personal attacks on named individuals or which otherwise bring the newspaper industry into disrepute will be deleted.

We will also delete comments that are not relevant to the story under which they appear, comments containing obscenities, including those where asterisks are used in place of the offending word, and comments containing racist or otherwise discriminatory language.

Comments will generally remain open on all stories except court cases, but owing to occasional abuse of the comment facility in the past, they will sometimes be disabled in the evenings and at weekends.

Please do not use the story comments facility to point out any spelling or grammatical errors on this site, as once the necessary correction is made, they will become obsolete and will have to be manually deleted. Instead, please notify us by emailing the editor on editor.htfp@and.co.uk with a link to the story in question.

If you have any observations to make about our comments policy, please email the publisher at editor.htfp@and.co.uk