At the meeting about controlled parking zones at Oxford Town Hall on Tuesday evening, what was not sufficiently emphasised was that in Headington, Marston and Northway, the need for parking controls has arisen solely because of the massive expansion of Oxford Brookes University and the hospitals.

As these expanded facilities are for the benefit of people from a very wide catchment area, the cost of sorting out the parking problems they have created - and the additional problems that will arise once services now located at the Radcliffe Infirmary are transferred to Headington in January - should not be the sole responsibility of Oxford residents.

It is not unreasonable to expect an on-going contribution from these institutions, at least to subsidise, if not wholly fund, the zones needed to control parking by their staff and students.

Furthermore, the problem of a vastly increased number of people chasing a static or dwindling number of parking places is largely the result of the unrestrained and increasingly intensive development that has been going on in Oxford for several years.

There is a limit to the number of people that can be healthily and safely housed in a given area, or regularly transported to and from it. The county council has no power to stop such intensive development.

Neither, it would seem, do city councillors, who have little real influence in the face of a relaxation of planning controls allowed by a Government hell-bent on seeing the whole of the South East cemented over.

Marilyn Cox, Jack Straw's Lane, Headington, Oxford