Sir – The county and city councils are hard up. The answer to their shortfall should be an enlightened, radical, tough and businesslike approach to cutting their costs.
All businesses, if they are to survive and prosper, have to constantly look at their costs and efficiency.
The councils' simple solution to their financial problems appears to be an indiscriminate raising of prices wherever they can. If this approach were adopted by business, it would be a certain route to bankruptcy, unless of course they happened to be a monopoly!
Many of us lobbied long and hard to persuade the council to abolish charges for evening and Sunday parking (note: no other town or city have such a policy, not even central London). The free parking has worked. Night-time and weekend economic activity has improved and the perception that Oxford is difficult, if not impossible, to access by car has been overturned.
The proposed re-introduction of charges for evening and Sunday parking can only reverse this success. There are better, more intelligent and constructive ways to balance the books without alienating our visitors.
Jeremy Mogford, Owner, the Old Bank Hotel and the Old Parsonage Hotel, Oxford
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