In his letter, Labour’s Brian Creese has lashed out at the concept of town and parish councils, saying they do nothing, charge a precept for doing so and have uncontested elections making them undemocratic.

With respect, I think it surprising that a longstanding political activist like him should have such a poor and flawed understanding of how they actually work.

His own parish of Worplesdon, to my knowledge, does verge and hedge maintenance that county highways won’t pay for, and funds the excellent Sidney Sime Gallery, as well as multiple play areas, green spaces and community halls.

It’s true that elections to the parish are usually uncontested, but the answer for that is for more local people to put themselves forward for elections if, like Mr Creese, they are unhappy with what the parish is doing in their name.

Candidates can also be automatically elected to the borough or county council without a vote being cast if they are unopposed (this happened in Waverley in 2011), but this is much rarer as political parties usually organise candidates to contest those elections; one of the often overlooked advantages of political parties is that they at least ensure you actually get to vote at the ballot box and make a choice between different candidates with different views.

Incidentally, there is currently a vacancy on Worplesdon Parish Council, so if Mr Creese is that concerned about the value for money it provides then perhaps he could consider applying to be co-opted on to it?

But Worplesdon is also a small and rural parish, meaning it isn’t much of a like-for-like comparison with what a Guildford Town Council might look like. A better comparison for those purposes would be something like Godalming Town Council which charges a precept of £10 a month and in return provides services including street furniture, community centres, a leisure centre, allotments and, most recently, a youth service.

Its elections are always contested, with four political parties represented on the council, but, contrary to Mr Creese’s claims about town councils being a job creation scheme for politicians, none of them are paid an allowance.

Mr Creese has also avowed surprise that the Liberal Democrats are supporting parish councils and the creation of a town council for Guildford; though I don’t know why, given those of us in Guildford Lib Dems have been clear in three successive local manifestos about our support for parish councils and the principles of localism.

There has not, historically, been much demand for a town council in Guildford, largely because various “optional extras”, which a town council would normally pay for, were instead “grandfathered” in as expenses of the borough council from when the unparished Guildford Urban District was merged with the parished Guildford Rural District.

Hence why GBC pays for a museum, tourist information, subsidises the Yvonne Arnaud, and provides many more parks, playgrounds, organised events and street furniture than is normal elsewhere.

This has always been an anomaly, in that those in parished areas have been paying a precept for their parish to provide services which are provided in the town out of GBC’s share of council tax, but that has been somewhat offset by the fact that GBC, pretty much, only charges for parking within the town, generating a massive revenue (larger than GBC’s share of council tax) which is used to fund services like bin collections across the whole borough.

But given we are now moving to a unitary council, things have changed. Any new unitary will be saddled with the vast expenses of the obligatory provision of social care and special educational needs (thanks, by the way, to this Labour government which has followed its Tory predecessors in refusing to fix the crippling crisis in those sectors), and the cost of this will soon crowd out any “optional extra” services which might be highly valued and nice to have but which the council isn’t legally required to oblige.

And since large councils are capped on how much they can increase council tax by each year, this will mean a real risk that Guildfordians will see all the money from our car parks and other assets diverted to bailing out social care, while funding is cut for the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, heritage services are scrapped, park maintenance is downgraded, and community services are scaled back completely.

In a democracy there will always be a choice to be made by voters of whether they want to pay more tax for more services or pay less for fewer services, but the reality of local government for fifteen years has been that central government rules and restrictions have eliminated that choice for everywhere without a parish council.

And, given we are likely to see a new unitary forced to cut services to pay the price for Labour kicking social care reform into the long grass, if Guildfordians want to even have the option to make a choice, then we really will need a town council.

Like most people I don’t relish paying any more council tax, but if it’s a choice between losing the Yvonne Arnaud and meals on wheels, or paying up £5 a month extra in council tax, then I’d rather pay a little more and keep those services. But if the majority of residents prefer the former then they should be able to decide as much at the ballot box.

A Guildford town council will give all of us that choice. Not having one will leave us completely powerless in the matter. It’s as simple as that.