TOWN parking charges are up again; leading national retailers have difficulty persuading managers to come to, or stay in their Swindon stores.

Swindon people are voting with their feet and avoiding the town centre if at all possible.

The decline is apparent to all, save the councillors and officers who have presided over the town's decline.

The council has continued to strangle the golden egg-laying goose of the town centre until now you can almost smell its poor rotting carcass.

The sound bites from the council over the past ten years regarding parking and other town centre issues both from officers and councillors would be laughable if not so serious.

"We need to maintain our income with less people using the car parks." (If they ran a business this way they would go bust quicker than the businesses they are currently destroying.)

"Car parking is NOT price sensitive." (This is one of my favourites AND most obviously ridiculous courtesy of Nick Beaumont-Jones.)

"We need to keep parking spaces free for shoppers" (With these charges shoppers are using the acres of free parking in the out of town shopping centres being built against council policy.)

"The pricing structure is designed to keep spaces available for shoppers rather than for people who work in the centre." (Unless maybe you work for the council, when you may park for free. The major effect is to reduce town centre visitors and dissuade shoppers from coming to the town centre.)

"We are trying to encourage people out of their cars." (Oh yeah so why allow planning for acres of free parking and all the out of town shopping centres?)

I drove past the new Swindon city centre (Asda Walmart) on a Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago.

There was a queue to get into the car park, though I was able to park in an almost empty car park when I got to the town centre.

I have a few simple messages for the council:

1, Stop strangling the town it is already dead.

2, Councillors stop blindly following officers' advice, they are often wrong. It is why we have elected representatives you can sack failing officers, we can vote you off.

3, Officers wake up to reality and face up to the damage you do or seek employment elsewhere.

We have a full year before local elections let's start a campaign to list councillors who have a sensible, publicly-stated town centre policy and follow this up with their votes and action in council during the year. Then we will know who to vote out in the 2006 local elections.

J PHILLIPS

Swindon