District Councillors Colomb and Green continue to claim that the main reason to oppose the creation of a Town Council for the town of High Wycombe is that such a move would cost the residents a great deal more in council tax. However, I would have thought that anyone taking the trouble to look closely at the figures might actually come to the opposite conclusion.

Cllr Colomb points out that if a High Wycombe Town Council were to charge a band D taxpayer for its services at the same rate as Aylesbury Town Council, that would represent an increase in charges of £34.01 a year compared with what they pay at present.

If you take into account the fact that there are around 1.5 wage earners per household in the district, this amounts to cost of less than 44p per week per wage earner in a Band ‘D’ household. (Today, that would pay for less than a quarter of a pint of beer or a cup of coffee, surely not much to pay for the benefits of such a move.) Even this is probably an overestimate, since Cllr Colomb forgot to include the current costs of the Charter Trustees in his comparison, and many households in the area are assessed at less than the band D rate.

So perhaps the figures do speak for themselves, and it is Cllrs Colomb and Green, rather than Cllrs Hall and Hayday, who are making the “desperate comparisons” they speak of?

Derek Done, Marlow