Sir – I am one of some 60,000 assorted carers in Oxfordshire: poverty-stricken immigrants looking after elderly parents, affluent commuters looking after disabled children, pensioners looking after invalid spouses, and many more.

With common dignity and family pride, most of us accept our lot, and it takes great tact and sensitivity to persuade us that there are, in fact, many ways in which we can be helped. After years of painstaking face-to-face outreach the three carers’ centres in the county have succeeded in bringing these possibilities to the attention of over 9,000 people, often transforming their lives. Now the county council imagines that it can locate a further 36,000 carers simply by emasculating the three centres and handing over outreach to only six workers (yet to be recruited), backed up by a telephone call centre with staff trained to identify carers when giving other information.

If anyone does ring them up, I pity these poor telephonists, as they encounter either an embarrassed silence, or a disgusted “That’s none of your business, young person!” as the phone is slammed down!

This strategy would be comical, if it were not so destructive. The carers’ centres do an irreplaceable job, as the county council will learn when, in a couple of years’ time, it is forced to re-invent the wheel.

But, in the meantime, a wonderful team of dedicated workers and volunteers will have seen their years of sensitive face-to-face befriending thrown aside in pursuit of idiotic targets; and the carers of Oxfordshire will have been despicably betrayed.

Hubert Allen, Old Marston