Under the Government’s Localism Bill, councils are encouraged to engage with residents at a grassroots level.

Oxford City Council had just such a mechanism in the area committee system.

The obvious way forward would have been to develop these committees and make sure that residents knew about them and used them.

At the East Area Parliament we often had residents coming back to thank us for carrying forward their ideas or solving local problems, but I would have liked to improve our publicity which was minimal. Too many people were still unaware that there were these committees.

Even so, when there were matters of concern, we would have up to 100 people attending our committees. It was important that the committees were there on a regular basis and that people could become involved in decisions made about their area.

However, some of the Labour-run committees were poorly attended and often cancelled.

This might have been because Labour’s ethos is towards the centralisation of power and autocracy, as we saw only too well in the Blair government.

Labour councillors see their job as primarily upholding the decisions of their party rather than listening to the views of their residents. We have seen that in the case of the proposed closure of Temple Cowley Pool.

The Labour administration was going to use its slight majority on the council and its total control of the executive to abolish the area committees.

However, they found that it had to go through a token consultation before it could legally do this.

The consultation avoided any direct question as to whether people preferred the proposed area forums to the present committees and did not provide sufficient information, so that there were quite a few Don’t Knows.

However, the results clearly indicated that very few residents were in favour of the proposed system. And 85 per cent of respondents were opposed to the change to the two gerrymandered planning committees that are proposed to replace planning decisions at a truly local level.

Our “strong leader” Bob Price’s excuse, in Wednesday’s Oxford Mail, for ignoring this result was that the people who responded had a “vested interest in maintaining the current committees”.

Too right, Bob. That “vested interest” is known as democracy.

Nuala Young, Green Party city councillor, St Clement’s ward, Oxford