Sir – In response to councillor Mitchell’s plea for alternatives to offset library service funding cuts, may I suggest that he looks at the one area he does not mention in his letter, namely that of the bureaucracy within County Hall (and other locations) which is not involved in the provision of direct services to the public.

One quarter of the library service’s annual expenditure consists of a ‘recharge’ for corporate overheads. This recharge covers the cost of such things as buildings maintenance and ICT, as well as corporate management overheads.

However, the average recharge for library services in other authorities is around 13 per cent, half that for Oxfordshire which has seen its recharge as a proportion of its overall expenditure increase year on year for at least the past decade.

If councillor Mitchell pruned some of the dead wood within his bureacracy, he would ensure that at least more of his branch libraries remained alive.

As a senior employee of the library service until last year, I know that this issue was raised unsuccessfully on numerous occasions with senior county council officers, but then when have turkeys ever voted for Christmas?

Rex Harris, Retired librarian, Oxford