Sir, What a week for the county council highways department. Not content with demonstrating their inability to manage traffic through the Headington roadworks, they are also keen to show that they cannot engineer roads to handle mildly adverse weather conditions.

Given the councils evident determination to make all Oxford car owners pave over their front gardens to avoid the Oxford car owners tax, I predict that the water run-off problems that will be a guaranteed consequence of council policy will make flooding a more frequent problem in the city.

P J Cresswell, Oxford