LAST Wednesday at the monthly council meeting of the West Dean Parish Council we were informed that the police, on account of their budget, had to choose between closing their stations in Lydney, Coleford, Cinderford or reduce their numbers.

Most policemen and women are protected from redundancy by reason of their royal warrant. But after 30 years service this lapses, and of course, this can stop recruiting. The parish council represents over 12,000 people but of course we were not being consulted. So we decided to send a letter to Mark Harper, MP, giving our collective view that West Gloucestershire was already under protected by the police and such a reduction of availability was unacceptable to us.

Of course the Gloucester Constabulary and perhaps Mark's record suggests he holds Government policy sacred but at least we tried. I then read that another cost saving idea was to order some of the CID officers into uniform and direct them to show themselves in a community role.

I am not an expert on policing but information received from an insider suggests such a redeployment would be plain daft. The procedure is for the arresting officer to pass the arrest statement to his CID colleagues and they do the rest which may or may not lead to a prosecution.

This cannot be devolved on civilians for technical reasons. It has to be mastered by CID officers and without their expertise nothing is likely to happen.

Strangely the CID regard themselves as an elite body who have volunteered for that role. Curiously they are very rarely promoted to the highest ranks in the force. Perhaps there is some prejudice. Or perhaps the whole suggestion is so ridiculous that it is designed to confound the whole cutting process.

At the moment Cheltenham is having such a spate of burglaries that courts have been advised to inflict exemplary punishments such as prison. Police wandering round in uniform do not usually catch burglars.?This is usually to do with things like DNA and fingerprints and the CID putting cases together.

As for consultation, I was selected by the parish council to represent them at a meeting in Coleford to discuss the future of the Magistrate's Court as it has long been starved of dealing with local cases. There were seven parish councils represented; we served between us 30,000 people. We all told the civil servant we believed in local justice in the local area. If the man from the Ministry of Justice had simply said the Minister, Kenneth Clarke, had already decided to end centuries of local justice practice and close all 142 English and Welsh courts (to save a notional £42 million) we could have saved our breath and gone straight home. All over the country magistrates are resisting, some with judicial reviews. The Ministry has soothingly said: "People shall not have to make unreasonable long journeys to court." Tell that to someone living in Brockweir without a car and has been summoned to Cheltenham to attend court as a witness.

I once publically clashed with the Minister, Kenneth Clarke, when he was a Minister of Education. I suggest to Mark Harper that making our local police a shadow of its former self, and transferring all legal proceedings for the whole county to Cheltenham could lead to some people taking the law into their own hands. If our MP can get through to the Minister it would be a mighty achievement. But I hope he at least tries.

– Roger Horsfield, Pastors Road,?Bream.