Sir – In August, you published a letter in which I asked why Oxfordshire County Council had to announce the fact that they were turning off the speed cameras.

In a subsequent letter, councillor Keith Mitchell responded that this was a democratic duty. Well, he may be interested to know the views of the Secretary of State, Philip Hammond, who was recently interviewed by the transport journal Local Transport Today.

He expressed pleasure that Oxfordshire had turned the cameras on again, and said: “I am pleased because we never said turn the cameras off. We never thought turning the cameras off was a good idea.

“If you’re constrained on resource spending and you’ve got an infrastructure of cameras already installed, the sensible thing to do is to operate them less extensively but don’t tell anybody what you’re doing.

“The worst thing to do is to tell people you’ve turned them all off. Even if you can only afford to keep two or three of them live, so long as you don’t tell anybody, you’ve got a significant benefit from having them.”

While I don’t agree with much of the current policy on transport, in this case the minister was, in my view, spot on!

John Bates, Abingdon