The county council is proposing massive cost-cutting across its cultural heritage services, including the Oxfordshire Record Office, Oxfordshire Studies, the Victoria County History and the county museum service.

It appears that to minimise (but not altogether avoid) devastating cuts elsewhere, the council is likely, not for the first time, to seek the closure of Cogges Farm Museum at Witney.

The apparent need for such savage cuts is linked to another aspect of social and cultural services, namely the need to put more resources into social services in the face of an ageing population. Except in respect of safeguarding its own archives, provision of heritage services is not a statutory requirement for the county or districts, but this does not mean that such services do not play a vital role in helping to maintain and improve people's quality of life.

There should be a positive synergy between heritage and other social services. Axing heritage is not just short-sighted but counter-productive.

Instead, the county should be increasing the capacity of these services to get more people involved with their local history and heritage, thereby helping to keep more pensioners mentally and physically active, while also inspiring young people to care for their heritage in the face of unprecedented development.

Members of societies that promote history and heritage in Oxfordshire already help in various ways, but the potential to get people involved is far from being fully exploited.

But mobilising volunteer support in ways that would increase the county's capacity to serve a growing population needs professional support and access to resources to develop initiatives and projects and attract extra external funding.

Reducing staff to a minimum and further reducing public access is not a way out - it will just trigger a downward spiral of further year-on-year cuts.

In this year of all years when we have been celebrating the county's millennium, county councillors should by now have realised that Oxfordshire's heritage is not a burden but a social, educational and economic asset deserving more investment, not less.

They need to think more strategically about the value of heritage services and how to mobilise the latent potential of the voluntary sector to get more people engaged with their own history and heritage.

GEORGE LAMBRICK President Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society Boars Hill Oxford