Sir – I am pleased that the county council appears to be having a rethink on its proposals to close half of its libraries.

These proposals lacked coherence and logic and failed to convince the people of Oxfordshire.

In most cost-cutting exercises it is the bloated and inefficient parts of the enterprise that get the chop.

However Oxfordshire County Council did not appear to think along such conventional lines. The council’s own figures reveal that the most efficient library in Oxfordshire in terms of the cost spent per visitor served is the Botley library. This costs the council tax payer 53p per visitor. By contrast the Oxford Central library spends £1.52 to service each visitor it receives.

It may (or may not) be a surprise that the Botley library was one of those slated for closure. The county council’s approach to reducing library expenditure was crass and unimaginative. It saw lines in a ledger and sought to eliminate them.

Its next set of proposals need to put a bit more effort into looking behind the ink and instead think about what they represent.

If some libraries can deliver service more cheaply than others, surely they should be encouraged? If others are much more expensive — why is that? Should not the approach be to examine the parts of the organisation where costs are excessive and take the lessons from those areas that are more frugal?

The county council’s strange logic was that libraries like Botley that were cheap to run would not be rewarded for their efficiency, instead they would lose all their budget. This was apparently so that the more inefficient libraries, like the Oxford Central library, could be propped up and thereby have no incentive to reduce their costs.

Andrew Chapman, Botley