Keep the roads safe (From The Oxford Times)

Keep the roads safe

7:40am Thursday 9th September 2010 in

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Sir – May I second John Power’s call for councillor Ian Hudspeth to end his strange silence on the appalling and apparently political decision to turn off Oxfordshire’s speed cameras (Letters, September 2).

Not only were we assured by the county council over a period of many years that speed cameras save lives, a consideration that evidently no longer concerns them in the least. We were told also that they generate net revenue from fines, although that revenue goes to central government.

Very well, then: the current Conservative prime minister is a member of councillor Hudspeth and Keith Mitchell’s own party, and lives only a few miles away in the very same county.

Are we to believe that it is beyond the wit of such clever and go-getting politicians to talk to each other and come to an arrangement whereby instead of losing all that revenue anyway, at least Whitehall would allow Oxfordshire to keep it? Apparently so.

For 13 years we suffered from an almost total absence of joined-up government under incompetent Labour misrule. It is becoming ever more evident that we are in for the same ineptitude from the new government, and equally so as has been the case for some time from the same tired and hidebound county council old guard.

The money that could have been saved by avoiding the Ardley fiasco alone (Letters, September 2) would have sufficed to operate the speed cameras for many years.

Or how about scrapping the embarrassingly self-congratulatory Oxon News? We don’t need propaganda from Oxfordshire County Council, thanks very much: we need highways policies that make the roads as safe as possible.

John Kinory, Steeple Aston