8:40am Thursday 17th February 2011
Sir – I am making responses to five of your correspondents (Letters, February 10).
To Mr Maurice Herson and Mrs Wendy Greenberg: the investment in road improvements is capital money — you spend it once to secure an improvement and it is gone. The library service costs £8.7m every year to run and we are proposing to reduce the annual funding by £2m over the next four years. Stopping road improvements will fill a funding gap for a while, but not for long and the road network will continue to deteriorate in the meantime. This is not good economics or financial practice.
To Mr and Mrs Rodney Stableford: I am most unwilling to line the pockets of predatory lawyers by pursuing HM Government in a judicial review of their most important policy to eliminate the structural imbalance in our national finances when it seems that even Gordon Brown recognised the need to do this in his budget plans had he won the last General Election.
To Dr Diana Sanders: I am only sorry that your love of library buildings, collections, reference books and maps does not extend to the human beings — young and vulnerable, old, disabled, with learning disabilities or mental health problems — who will have to endure extra cuts if we were to exempt libraries. No one will die if there are a few fewer libraries in Oxfordshire.
Keith R Mitchell, Leader of the council, County Hall
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