If the County Council was even one 10th as incompetent as John E Wilson would have us believe (Oxford Mail, 12 August), you would expect the parents of the 80,000 children who attend our 350 schools every day to be crying out for new management, but I don't think they are.

Equally, if we were incompetent, you would expect many of the 8,000 older people or the 1,350 people with a physical disability or sensory impairment or the 700 adults with a mental health problem or the 1,200 adults with a learning disability that we look after every day of the year to be shouting out loud for a change in the management of their care.

You would certainly expect weekly stories of failure in the system.

Generally speaking this does not happen, because we have excellent staff who provide very good services.

We also manage 2,800 miles of the county's roads. If we had more money allowed to us by central government, there might be fewer potholes but, generally speaking, the road system works remarkably well given the volume of traffic.

We manage close on 1,000 buildings of various kinds across the county and we look after 19,000 hard working members of staff. We issue about three and three quarter million library books to our avid book readers in a year and collect almost all of them in again! Our library users value our service. I could go on, but I won't.

Mr Wilson's comments are a shameful calumny on a good and caring council. He is clearly aiming his unhelpful comments at elected members. Would he prefer the council to be run from Whitehall? Or by Sainsbury's? Or by some quango populated by Tony's cronies? Come clean Mr Wilson, what are you asking for? Keith R Mitchell, Leader of the Council, County Hall, Oxford