Sir – In last week’s The Oxford Times Public ‘not listened to” over 10,000 home fears a quote was used from my speech at the shambolic SODC meeting on behalf of the Didcot Ring of Parishes that “Anyone who has read the Core Strategy would wonder if those who wrote it have been on another planet”.

However, you only quoted half of my sentence, which ended “. . . for the last three years”.

The reason behind my comment becomes apparent as I am inferring that the authors of in infamous core strategy have failed to notice that we are in the deepest recession for 60 years.

The core strategy talks about a “thriving economy” in chapter six and includes significant infrastructure development linked to doubling Didcot’s size to help create houses for the growing population based on the rapid growth of “Science Vale UK”, the new name for Harwell’s science parks, apparently and Culham which they say will double in size. The plan for infrastructure is close to £200m for the Didcot expansion and the folly of this plan was exposed last week when a vital link road near Harwell now might not be built due to budget cuts. This is our fear, that the houses will get built, but the infrastructure doesn’t because no one can afford it. This is compounded by the fact that nothing at all is planned to mitigate against the additional traffic movements north of Didcot once Ladygrove is doubled in size to the north.

Don’t worry though, because according to planning officers where you build houses won’t make any difference to the amount of traffic trying to squeeze over the two over-capacity bridges at Culham and Clifton Hampden. I’d love to see the research on that one!

Tom Bowtell, Long Wittenham