Sir — You report the Radcliffe Hospitals Trust’s efforts to shift a couple of public paths which interfere with its plans for the new cancer centre at the Churchill Hospital (Report, September 5).

Its spokesman is quoted as saying that ‘it would be too stupid for words if this row ends up delaying the opening of this fantastic new centre’.

This is a classic piece of misleading spin by a large and arrogant corporate organisation.

The spokesman omits to mention that the trust has deliberately blocked two public footpaths by building over them.

This action prevented the Oxford City Council from changing the route of the paths under the Town and Country Planning Act. The Act enables paths to be moved to implement a planning permission — but not if the development is already substantially complete, as this one was.

The hospital was thus the direct author of the delays of which it now complains. The city council gave up and the county council has resorted to other and inappropriate legislation (a device to which several bodies representing local users have objected).

The path changes could have gone to the Secretary of State for determination more than a year ago and have by now been settled, but for the hospital’s action.

To crown it, the trust has now put up absurd notices in the strip of land between the Boundary Brook and the hospital site instructing the public to keep to the public paths (which it has made impassable).

Yet there need be no delay, as the trust knows. If it will, in recompense, open these few acres of unused land to public access, my society will withdraw its objection.

Chris Hall, Oxfordshire footpaths officer, Open Spaces Society, Henley-on-Thames