I am taking the trouble to write this letter so that your readers can save time, cost and patience in even attempting to contact the Highways Department of Epsom and Ewell Council or Surrey County Council, who by their deliberately obstinate attitude quite obviously do not wish to speak to members of the public irrespective of how valid their requests are.

The fact that a menu exists when you phone the council is confirmation of this. Epsom and Ewell council gleefully telling you that one must phone Surrey County Council since the responsibility for everything to do with highways has been passed to them.

When one phones 08456 009009 a menu tells you that all assistants are busy, please leave a message, but if anyone does ring back they refuse to give their name, tell you that they do not know the name of the manager of the highways department but they will email him and ask him to ring back which, of course, he does not do.

Fortunately, I was able to see the foreman again when he had not completed the resurfacing work of Park Avenue West and I mentioned that I had been told that an address in Leatherhead was involved with highways work programmes. To my amazement he told me he did not know of that address and he received his instructions by phoning a certain number and only by my insistence that I would not leave him until I had a telephone number and a name did he very reluctantly give me the details of someone to speak to.

It was the celebrated author Professor C Northcote Parkinson who in 1957 first drew attention to the absurdity' of all bureaucracies in his Parkinson's Law, increasing their numbers on the one hand by self perpetuity and concealing' their identity on the other hand by refusing to speak to callers when they phone, giving no other telephone numbers or any names of people and denying any knowledge of the existence of other departments, let alone what their responsibilities are.

No wonder barely 20 per cent of people ever come out to vote at council elections and some 50 per cent of those entitled to vote do not turn out at general elections.

If anyone closed down these departments completely one wonders if anyone would notice.

P H BROWN Stoneleigh Surrey