Sir – Sylvia Lymbery is quite right in saying that Oxford council’s intention to deprive the people of Cowley and nearby areas of their local pool is perplexing (Letters, November 29).

There are, in fact, quite a few perplexing aspects to this plan: several of them can be found in your feature “Swimming against the tide?” (News analysis, November 8). Here are just some of them:


1: Councillor Van Coulter, board member for leisure services, asserts that there are three options: close Temple Cowley pool and not replace it, repair the existing pool and build the new one, or demolish Temple Cowley pool and build a replacement.
Mr Coulter forgot a fourth option, one that has the merit of combining economy with the wishes of many thousands of Oxford’s residents: repair the existing pool and not build a new one.


2: Ian Brooke, head of leisure and parks, states that ‘we’ have facilities such as the ice rink etc which make ‘us’ money (who is ‘us’?), contrasting them with those that do not. The implication seems to be that the purpose of leisure facilities is a commercial one, namely to make money for the council. Naively, I had always assumed that their purpose is to provide leisure services to the local residents.


3: Mr Brooke also says: “Having to heat water in a diving pool we don’t use means the carbon footprint of the building is very high.”


Leaving aside the point that repairing this pool would be orders of magnitude cheaper than building a new one in Blackbird Leys, as the council wants, construction of the latter would generate far more carbon emissions than operating Temple Cowley pool for decades. The council always ignores this point in its presentations.
Isaac Szobel, Steeple Aston