Sir, – The report in last week's Herald of the meeting of Waverley's environment and leisure scrutiny committee suggests that I refused to try to make reductions in the council tax. Let me summarise what really happened. Before Christmas, the Liberal Democrat administration brought forward draft budget proposals, and then made some reductions to them. They subsequently asked the three scrutiny committees to propose further reductions of £150,000, to keep council tax down to a level which might receive cross- party support The environment and leisure scrutiny committee spent more than an hour examining many line items of the budget, in each case being advised that cuts would either be counter-productive or would damage disadvantaged groups. During this discussion, the portfolio holder for finance, Stewart Edge (LD), said that cuts of £100,000 were needed in this committee's area of interest. We also received a detailed presentation from the finance department. Several councillors felt that the committee had been provided with inadequate information. I therefore proposed that we should simply recommend taking £50,000 out of the planning department budget and £50,000 out of the environment and leisure department budget, and ask the executive and the officers to determine the details since they have access to all the relevant information. This provoked a strong response from officers, which was rather surprising since those are the only two departments within the remit of this scrutiny committee. Mrs Mitchell (LD) then proposed cutting out a line item of £20,000, which had not previously been mentioned, probably because many of us had campaigned for this particular item to be included in the budget. This expenditure was to be targeted at providing guidance to householders to help them cope with the imminent new world of alternating fortnightly waste and recycling collections. The director for environmental services then said that it would be fine to take this item out of the budget since DEFRA (the relevant government department) had agreed to grant £70,000 towards the waste collection change programme. At this stage, I pointed out that this demonstrated that we were not in possession of adequate information and there was no point in trying to make detailed decisions. Who knows what other chunks of money may be tucked away in hidden drawers? David Harmer, Waverley councillor for Hindhead, Tower Road, Hindhead