Sir – One might be more persuaded by councillor Tanner’s strident declarations regarding localism and democracy (Letters, March 15), if he and his fellow Labour politicians on Oxford City Council weren’t hell-bent on demolishing the hugely popular Temple Cowley Pools in the face of ongoing protests and petitions from the local population, the people who actually use the pools and want to see them saved.

These repeated petitions are among the largest, if not actually the largest, in Oxford’s history.

But do the Labour councillors care one jot about the wishes of the local population, or about the concepts of localism and democracy? Clearly not, except where they can use them in order to score political points off the Conservatives.

Temple Cowley Pools have many years of life left in them, despite Labour’s absurdly counter-factual denials on Oxford council’s website. They can be refurbished for £3m.

Instead, councillor Tanner and his colleagues want to waste £13m of ratepayers’ money on demolishing a valuable, popular, heavily-used and publicly-funded centre, located where people actually want it in an area already short of leisure facilities and build a vastly more expensive one where nobody wants it: neither the people of Cowley, Temple Cowley and Florence Park, nor the people living around the valuable open space that the council wants to concrete over and destroy in order to build on it their white elephant. The only people who want it there are the Labour council.

John Kinory, Steeple Aston