I WAS disturbed to read in last week's Hereford Times of the views attributed to Councillor Stuart Thomas about the establishment of radiotherapy services at Hereford County Hospital.

I know a number of people who have had to make the journey to Cheltenham to receive radiotherapy and, from their accounts, I know of the cruel stresses imposed by long journeys (and even longer waiting times in what is a heavily over-burdened unit) on those already suffering pain and anxiety.

For me, this is enough fully to justify the campaign being led by Allan and Angela Lloyd.

However, Councillor Thomas's attitude, as reported, seems to me to exhibit an assumption which ought to be most vigorously challenged.

Herefordshire is a rural county with a low population density, a relatively high proportion of elderly people and one of the lowest average wage rates in the West Midland region. There has been very little acknowledgement of these problems by national governments of either major party over the past 35 years. Instead, an increasingly urban planning model has been applied to the resourcing of both health and education services.

The resulting requirement for economies of scale has led to centralised provision of a sort that ill serves a rural area, though it is attractive to governments that want to exert strong ideological control - a characteristic shared by both the Thatcher/Major and Blair regimes.

A good public service will demonstrate both efficiency and effectiveness. It may be more 'efficient' in the narrowest sense of the word to make people travel from northern Herefordshire and Powys all the way to Cheltenham for radiotherapy, but, if it causes stress so severe that some even decline to continue with their treatment, it can scarcely be described as effective.

The logic that says you need a population base of 600,000 to justify the establishment of a local centre for radiotherapy is of the same sort that said Herefordshire had too small a population to be a first tier local authority and led to the ill-starred merger with Worcestershire.

I should have thought any self-respecting elected member of Herefordshire Council would have been ashamed to accept this spurious and discredited orthodoxy.

Perhaps Councillor Thomas did not mean what he appears to have said. I hope so. If this is the case, he should tell us.

Adrian Harvey, Kings Caple.