CLEARLY your editorial comment (Tuesday’s Oxford Mail) about Labour’s city council budget last year touched a nerve with Ed Turner, the councillor in charge of finance.

However, the facts speak for themselves.

The Greens said at the budget meeting last year we didn’t need to make nearly £2m of cuts in services and make all these people redundant. We moved a fully-costed alternative budget that would have saved Temple Cowley Pools, had free collection of garden waste and stopped many of the other cuts and charges Labour introduced.

The Green alternative was not fantasy but recognised as a balanced budget by council finance officers.

We said at the time that the ludicrous pessimistic assumptions built into the Labour budget would result in extremely bloated surpluses and that is exactly what happened.

The reserves built up to £5.2m by the summer (the council only needs about £2.5m in reserves).

Of course, Ed Turner neglects to tell us that the cuts in the Government’s grants to local government started with a vengeance under the last Labour Government, with millions of pounds of funding cut in 2008-9 and 2009-10.

The new Government continued the attack but the real cuts came under Labour.

Many of these ‘cuts’ were covers for other policies.

The abolition of the council’s area committees and local democracy, for example, had nothing to do with saving money. It was simply to shift power from local people into the hands of a tiny Labour cabal, who run the council their way.

These are hard times but, of course, this did not stop Labour going ahead with spending £9.2m on a swimming pool at Blackbird Leys – perhaps the most expensive 25-metre pool in the UK and three times more expensive than Barton Pool.

The fact that the existing Blackbird Leys pool and Temple Cowley could be refurbished for £3m was ignored as they went ahead with spending one-third of the council’s annual budget on one project.

DAVID WILLIAMS, Leader, Green Party group, Oxford City Council