ORDINARY people would be forgiven for wondering whether they’re being abandoned by services that are supposedly there to protect them.

Oxford City Council officers, who to be fair face an invidious task of finding £162,000 in cuts from their environmental department budget, are floating the idea that effectively they abandon any pretence of dealing with many noisy neighbours.

The council was unable to give us any real idea where it would draw the line.

But the fair assumption is that the bulk of people suffering real problems with their neighbours will be left to their own devices.

Thames Valley Police, an organisation with its own budget pressures, is about to cut the hours that people can go into a police station and report a crime.

It will point to its call centres (or going online) as ways of alerting officers that you’ve been burgled or bashed, but it just smacks of increasingly putting the public at arm’s length.

When many people are the victims of crime or in difficulty, they need the reassurance that only face-to-face contact will bring.

Making more and more contact with the police similar to doing your banking or sorting out a Sky Movies subscription just feeds the feeling the police are less and less on the side of the ordinary man in the street.

How about this real life example: The victim of an assault walked into St Aldate’s police station and went to the front counter to lay his complaint.

He was pointed to a phone in the corner to speak to a call handler rather than the real life humans just feet away in Oxford’s main police station.

Both organisations face financial strains but they must ensure they do not deliver a message that they just don’t care about people any more.