In proposing charges for parking at Harrow Leisure Centre to ‘stop commuters’, Labour is using the usual municipal tripe as an excuse for ‘revenue raising’.

The concept of free parking, when it makes good sense, just doesn’t register. The charges will see a substantial reduction in usage of the leisure centre, its halls and facilities.

Harrow Borough Council will attribute substantial business loss to the cuts, economic conditions and outside forces and will raise admission and parking charges to make up the shortfall, depressing custom further, or, that it will close.

The Conservatives wanted to replace it with a new, albeit slightly smaller, far more efficient centre, together with a new mental health unit, paid from the sale of the old driving centre and part of the car park for new housing.

I am now told that for all of that bluster, Labour intend to flatten it and put in its place a smaller one, with housing built on the rest — presumably the now standard overpriced, undersized ‘sustainable’, high-density, future slums with no parking they’ve filled the rest of Harrow with.

The town centre is to be blighted by high-rise buildings and Harrow’s libraries and arts are being butchered while Labour waste millions on PR, Capita, tarting up the civic centre yet again, and nice shiny iPads for councillors.

Hillingdon Council not only froze its council tax for the seventh year running, it refurbished all of its libraries and still have half-hour free parking — this despite all of those ‘vicious cuts’.

And which idiot came up with the monumentally stupid scheme to charge households £75 per year to collect garden waste, while burdening us with yet another bin cluttering up our properties?

Jeremy Zeid

Brampton Grove, Kenton