Sir – I’m astonished that, at a time when the Liberal Democrat/Conservative Coalition Government is forcing local councils to make massive cuts in essential services, the local Liberal Democrats should be urging even more cuts in order to bring back a bureaucratic and ineffective planning system.

Our planning system is supposed to be, and is, non-party political.

Yet the old area committees, which they are seeking to revive, politicised planning in that virtually every one only had councillors from only one party on them.

The north area committee, which I attended from time to time, only had Liberal Democrat councillors on. Others in the city only had Labour councillors on.

This is no way to decide planning decisions. But in addition to this flaw, they cost vastly more than the non-partisan system introduced by the current Labour council. This is because decisions were taken on political rather than planning grounds, with the result that many applicants took the decision to appeal and won, with the city bearing all the costs. To reintroduce this daft system, which I initially supported because it sounded sensible, would mean having to make substantial cuts elsewhere in Oxford’s council services.

There probably isn’t a perfect planning system and, because decisions can’t be taken on the basis that a proposed development doesn’t look nice — a wholly subjective assessment — many decisions leave members of the public dissatisfied, at least the current one is non-partisan and fair.

So, for instance, councillors from all three parties voted in support of the development at Roger Dudman Way, which has caused so much discontent. Perhaps they were wrong, perhaps they were right, but it wasn’t a political decision; it was a planning decision.

Stuart Skyte, Oxford