Swindon Council's STEAM museum is doubtless a marvellous facility and so it should be, at a cost of over £11 million of public funding.

Lottery funding, business sponsorship and ratepayers taxes are brilliant funders to those who can get them, and these presumably leave the attraction with no mortgage or building investment costs to fund.

But despite these, the facility looks likely to run at a loss of £470,000.

As an initiative of the council, this was a project to be determined by politicians (many, if not most, of whom had no major business experience, let alone in tourism).

These same politicians seek to control other private tourism facilities in the borough through their planning decisions. Its own planning policy states: "Reflecting public sector spending restrictions, it is, however, likely that the private and voluntary sectors will either singularly or in partnership with the borough council play an increasingly important and wide ranging role in leisure, recreation and tourism provision."

Despite this, the council saw fit to impose such severe restrictions on my own farm visitor centre, and then to refuse to remove them, that it forced its closure.

Despite receiving more than 4,000 letters against the decision, it fought the appeal that I lodged and lost most handsomely!

The effect of this crisis on my centre in the past four years is that I have lost in excess of £200,000 of income, seen my overdraft quadruple and my entire business and investment plan set back by five years. I do not have the opportunity of seeing local ratepayers bailing me out for the council's bad decisions.

The irony of the whole thing, however, lies in a few statistics. Roves Farm Visitor Centre cost me in the region of £100,000 to set up STEAM cost £11m.

STEAM expected approximately 200,000 visitors per year our busiest year saw just over 20,000 visitors.

Could any eloquent councillor (past or present) tell me how the spending of 100 times the money to get only 10 times the visitors is an accountable way to spend public money?

RUPERT BURR

Roves Farm, Sevenhampton