Sir – John Power’s ability to dress up an untruth as an apparently unassailable statistic (Letters, August 12) never ceases to amaze me. Our budget is close to a billion pounds per annum. Just about half of that slithers straight through our financial systems to our schools by Government diktat.

Another quarter of a billion goes in funding our care services — hugely important with a growing elderly population and with child protection issues following the Baby P case.

After that, there is a list of highway maintenance, fire and rescue service, libraries and museums and a whole host of other much-valued services. The Government’s withdrawal of specific grant for road safety measures could either be passed on to the Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership, or we could have applied more cuts to children’s services or the fire service or some other critical public service area.

We face a level of national debt close to a trillion pounds (a thousand billion pounds or £1 plus fifteen zeros!) Gordon Brown’s government spent more than it received in every year from 2001. We can’t go on doing this. The day of reckoning is here. Either we face it squarely now or our children and their children and grandchildren will face a share of national debt that is unsustainable. The choice is simple.

John Power is a lifelong Labour supporter and I am afraid he demonstrates the desire of his party to carry on spending regardless of the state of the economy. I think it says it all — rather like Liam Byrne who left a note to his successor to say “the money has all run out”!

Keith R Mitchell, Leader of the council, County Hall, Oxford