LIKE many of your readers, I was surprised and offended by last week’s piece on the latest attempts by the Conservative county council to raise more money from their hard-pressed ratepayers (Advertiser, September 21, ‘Pay a pound to save services, says leader’).

The latest gimmick appears to be charging for statutory services.

Mr Perry, the Tory leader, continues to press for a £1 charge on each trip to the waste dump. This is despite the fact that the proposal was unanimously rejected during the public consultation, and more to the point is illegal.

Recently, many will have learnt of the plan to charge pensioner bus pass holders 50p for each trip. The first I heard about this proposal was from colleagues who attended a local transport coordination meeting. Interestingly, the proposal did not appear on the pre-meeting briefing pack.

Allied to this lack of transparency about attempts to raise money against entitlements that we are already paying for, either through rates or direct taxation, is the silence over the services that are being cut. These include the lack of youth services, and a considerably lower spend than other authorities on adult social care as a percentage of the budget.

Local authority budgets are far from clear, and some councils want to keep us in the dark, but I am also concerned that the Conservative county council appears to have shifted resources from special needs schools to adult services in an attempt to alleviate the lack of money allocated to adult social care.

This robbing Peter to pay Paul is not good for the council nor it is good for us.

There is no doubt that many of the problems are due to economic mismanagement.

Reserves appear to be increasing, but what is the point of reserves if you do not spend them in a time of need?

Furthermore, the lack of innovative approaches to public finance and investment has not helped. As Einstein pointed out, repeating the same process and expecting different results is a sign of madness. We should have some sympathy for the council as they have suffered central government budget cuts.

But the central government is Conservative, and so too the county council so please do not pass the buck of responsibility between you.

Ideology is no substitute for competence and providing good services. We should demand better for Hampshire.

We certainly demand better for Andover.

Luigi Gregori, Charlton Road, Andover