CONCERNING your recent article about sports facilities at Five Mile Drive: we welcome the new ‘pavilion’ (in fact a permanent portable building), but it’s worth remembering how we got to this point.

Labour at the city council promised £4.5m back in 2013 for a list of pavilion-related projects, including one at Five Mile Drive. They then exhausted that budget. Children in Wolvercote and North Oxford have been left for the whole of this season with limited or no facilities when playing football at Five Mile Drive, sometimes with nowhere to go to the toilet, and threatened with their various teams in Summertown Stars being kicked out of the league.

Local residents and councillors pushed hard, including asking questions to the board member about the detail of how the original budget was allocated. These questions remain unanswered. There will also be plenty of people in Wolvercote who will notice that the new provision does not contain any sort of community facility of the kind provided elsewhere in the city.

Local councillors are pleased that the Labour administration has finally acknowledged the need they have ignored for so long. But the process of getting them to this point has been pretty shambolic.

City councillor Steve Goddard (Wolvercote ward), city councillor Angie Goff (Wolvercote ward), county councillor Paul Buckley (Wolvercote and Summertown division)