Sir, Councillor Alan Armitage is wrong to state (Letters, June 2) that I voluntarily absented myself from the area committee meeting where the Primary Care Trust planning application to build a new 'Super-surgery' on the Radcliffe Infirmary site was debated.

I was told I should leave because during the recent election campaign, at the end of April, I distributed a leaflet which said, 'The Greens are opposing plans to build a new centralised and partly privatised health centre on the Radcliffe Infirmary site, which would bring lots of extra traffic along Walton Street and close local health centres.' The city lawyer said that if I swung the vote against the scheme (which is in fact what officers were advising anyway) by my presence, the Primary Care Trust could mount a legal challenge against the city council, on the grounds that I had not had an open mind at the time of the debate.

So I stood at the back of the meeting room to listen to the debate without taking part, but was at that point told in no uncertain terms by a city council lawyer that I must leave. I left with obvious reluctance.

It seems to me that the law regarding bias and prejudgment is widely being interpreted wrongly and too draconianly. I do not believe that anybody who informs people what their local policy is and is subsequently elected should be barred from democratic debate on the basis of the leaflets, nor from voting on behalf of the people they represent.

Sushila Dhall, Oxfordshire Green Party