ublic parks have always been run at public expense and cannot be adequately funded any other way, yet Swindon Council say that Lydiard Park can be quasi-privatised by having it run by a not for profit organisation.

Now the thing about not for profit organisations is that they must make a profit or become bankrupt. The not for profit bit merely means shareholders don’t trouser the profits.

Therefore a trust to which the council gave Lydiard Park would have to raise money, and the obvious way would be to charge for parking and entry. Both of these would involve considerable outlay of money, parking meters and attendants for parking, secure fencing of the park and entrance pay booths and attendants for entrance fees and this money would have to be recouped.

An anecdote if I may. My daughter and her young son visited and it being a sunny Sunday we took a trip to Lydiard Park so that he could use the children’s playground. As it happened the playground was too busy and we had a pleasant walk. If the park was run by a trust then perhaps a £5 parking charge would be charged and an entrance fee of £5 for two adults and half price for the child £2.50. Who is going to pay up to £17.50 for a couple of hours in the children’s playground that might be too busy to use anyway?

What would happen next would be inevitable; less people would use the park which would become run down because of underfunding and even less people would use it and a vicious circle would exist until the park was little more than a rubbish dump that nobody used. The council would then say nobody wants the park and sell it off for housing.

If you think this is a pessimistic view, this would be better than the alternative. Consider what happened to the Arts Centre last year. The council said that the Arts Centre would be better run if it was separate from the council and called for voluntary groups to run it. A voluntary group was formed and applied to the council to run the Arts Centre. The council said the group was unsuitable and rejected the application, but took the fact that they had applied as agreement of the policy of getting rid of the Arts Centre and on that basis gave the Arts Centre to the commercial group that runs the Wyvern. The cafe has now gone, the library is now under threat and if the Arts Centre pursues the same pricing policy as the Wyvern, local groups will not be able to afford to use it.

Steve Thompson, Norman Road, Swindon