The letter from Jean Fooks, the city council's executive member for a cleaner city, on rubbish collection and recycling (Oxford Mail, October 30) makes one wonder if she and her fellow councillors live in the same world as us mere mortals.

I keep a home in the Canaries and another in Oxford. Eropean Union statistics on the efficient handling of recycling show that the UK is almost at the bottom of the list, whereas Spain is miles above. This is because councillors throughout the UK are now more inefficient than they have ever been, while collecting more money in expenses than ever before.

For example, in the Canaries, my 16-roomed city house, with large garden and swimming pool, costs about £200 per annum in council tax. Rubbish is collected daily for a charge of about £30 per annum and anything will be collected, including garden refuse, refrigerators, cookers and furniture.

Salaries for Spanish council workers compare favourably with those paid to council workers here and all sorting for recycling is carried out by the council workers. with no problems whatsoever for the homeowner.

In the Oxford suburbs, council tax on a modest three-bedroomed semi hovers around the £2,000 mark, with a small fortune being charged for bags used for garden waste.

The collection is currently weekly and containers and bits of garbage are left scattered on the pavements by the council workers to trip up the unwary or impaired.

Now Mrs Fooks tells us that a weekly collection should be unnecessary.

Councillors may not mind living in medieval squalor but I, and probably the majority of homeowners, do mind. A weekly collection is the absolute minimum, and that is pretty disgusting.

Why have councillors allowed Oxford to deteriorate so much over the past 30 years?

When I look at every pavement and road in the city and its suburbs, they look like patchwork quilts where the asphalt has been patched and repatched without any new surfaces seeming to have been laid anywhere, if one omits the Cornmarket shambles.

Have these people any real idea of how to administer anything? It is time we did a U-turn, abolished expenses for councillors and created a system where all tenders for public works have to undergo public approval before acceptance. We might then see some value for money at last.

If they don't know what they are doing, why don't they look at the way it is done elsewhere? If a more efficient system can be run in the Canaries for one tenth what it costs here, something has to be seriously wrong.

KEITH HAZELL St Paul's Crescent Botley, Oxford