Sir – From your recent correspondence columns, there seems to be a small wave of sympathy for the Environment Agency and their work during our recent floods in West Oxford. I do not share that view.

They are charged and funded by us, the taxpaying public, with flood defence, a task in which they singularly fail to do. Anybody, or anything, is to blame for floods, but not them. The latest excuse is Government cutbacks in funding — flatly contradicted by the Government.

I have no way of checking whether this is true or not, but I do know this: when we had the disastrous summer floods of 2007, the agency was forced to hold a public meeeting.

At the meeting they were taxed with the question: why have you not cleared the side streams of the River Thames, namely the Bullstake Stream, the Seacourt Stream, and the Hinksey Stream, which in their own written submission to the meeting was one of the principal reasons for the summer flooding in West Oxford?

Their reply at the meeting, witnessed and heard by many, was cutbacks in Government funding. At the meeting I read the following from their 2006 annual accounts. “Our total funding last year was £1,039m, an increase of £183m, or 21 per cent on the previous year.” I have retained copies of both documents for anybody to view.

They then promised in writing, in March 2008, to dredge these streams. There was some desultory willow lopping and that was it.

The truth is that this outfit is good at trying to sell lock-keepers’ cottages, sacking manual workers, and replacing engineers with environmentalists, but hopeless at their main job of defending us against flooding, however much public money is given to them.

John Power, Oxford