Sir - Flood relief provided by the Flood Relief Channel, as Reg Little must surely know (Report, July 27) would only be temporary.

I, for one, am certainly not strongly in favour and I don't know anyone who is.

The Environment Agency, following an outcry at the suggestion that our water woes could be fixed by another mighty, macho, multi-million engineering project, has very properly decided to concentrate on dredging, clearing drains and ditches, planting trees on land further upstream, etc, thus absorbing the water instead of taking it somewhere else. This is the kind of long-term thinking that builds on what we know and takes geographical and climate factors like the rainfall-cycle into account, and we should be glad to encourage it, instead of shouting like children for a quick fix that will do nothing to help in the end. I say this although I am one of the people who was flooded recently.

The proposed wind turbine in Botley is an example of this kind of thinking applied to energy, and a far-sighted city council would be welcoming it with open arms!

It works with our environment, not in spite of it, as a nuclear power station at Didcot, for instance, would do.

So let us be thankful that the Flood Relief Channel has been ditched, and applaud the forward thinking of the Environment Agency.

I'm glad to hear they are taking the time needed to weigh up all the pros and cons, and do not feel they are keeping us waiting unnecessarily.

This might also be the moment to acknowledge their sterling efforts to tame and disperse the recent flood waters, without which things would have been very much worse for many of us.

Angela MacKeith, Old Botley