I SEE that the villagers of Old Marston are rallying round to save their library (Oxford Mail, September 22).

I'm hardly surprised, since Old Marston, along with many village libraries, gets a raw deal in Oxfordshire County Council's latest library proposals.

I have spent some time studying its so-called “Quantitative Analysis of Service Requirements” and it contains myriad flaws, including not counting all the population, not considering current users, using suspect criteria and suspect data and processing that data using invalid methods. The results of the analysis is consequently seriously skewed to disadvantage village libraries.

But its worst crime is to then propose cuts way beyond anything justified by even their own biased figures.

The proposal to make up the gap in funding by the use of volunteers is utterly unrealistic. You’d need an army of volunteers, costly to recruit, CRB check, train and manage. They would be expected to run a library alone most of the time, with no professional present.

By making modest savings in management overheads and either spreading the rest evenly across all libraries, or making slightly greater savings at the largest libraries, the impact on users could be at least halved relative to their current proposals.

I have explained all this in a letter to Judith Heathcoat, the councillor responsible for libraries. Now the library consultation period is almost over, I urge your readers to keep in contact with their councillors and make sure the extensive feedback from the consultation is properly considered and these damaging proposals ditched in favour of a saner, fairer approach.

DAVID WATSON, Cold Harbour, Goring Heath