In the rapidly unfolding saga that is the Oxford City Council Labour administration's desperate attempt to balance next year's budget they are resorting it would appear to a fire sale of community owned assets - principally leisure centres and community owned buildings such as the Northway Centre. They are also proposing closing council owned public lavatories across the city to save money.

When I stood for election in Northway in May, Labour's campaigners were more interested in my views on the murderous public policy that is drugs prohibition than in my own ideas for redeveloping the Northway Centre under the aegis of a Community Land Trust to provide a fantastic community owned facility that could provide a real urban village centre based around the picturesque playing fields. My proposal, for which I had prepared a budget based on an Open Capital Partnership would have seen a new pavilion and sports center, a new community centre and a few flats above both to help provide the revenue to cover the cost of redevelopment.

If councillors Christian and Khan wish to discuss this I am still amenable, though I would require, only fairly, an apology for her party's disgraceful attempt to blacken my name during the elections before dealing with Mrs Christian I feel!

But it is to the leisure centres that I really want to turn my attention.

Let's not mention perhaps that this is a massive U-turn on the part of Oxford Labour group, who from the time I first mooted the idea (and indeed held meetings with senior staff and co-operative development agencies in 2000), have opposed any transfer of the leisure centres to any outside body. At the time of the 2002 elections, Labour's leisure spokesman, Peter Johnson, publicly called me a liar in the local press, saying that transferring them to a mutual was tantamount to privatization. I understand that the organization I was primarily talking about is now one of the main contenders to take the centres over.

Perhaps too it would be too much to suggest that, had they accepted this solution eight years ago, nearly a decade of losses on the service would not have been incurred by the city council. It is a bit rich of Labour to claim that the Lib Dem administration left them a budget black hole when they had spent all those years resisting this money saving measure Labour are now desperate to push through before the end of January that shortfall would never have existed.

Now, I still have the highest regard for the organization concerned, and I am sure they would, from their track record elsewhere, be worthy custodians of these public assets and make far better use of them than the city council has ever been able to do, with their budgetary hands tied by other priorities such as paying private bus companies for carrying pensioners on the central government mandated but underfunded bus pass scheme.

However time has marched on and other forms of ownership have emerged in that period. Mechanisms that would:

• keep these assets in community ownership
• provide a capital receipt to the city council for taking them over
• provide cheaper and more sustainable development finance to produce a fantastic portfolio of facilities to replace the aging wrecks they have been reduced to under city council ownership and,
• perhaps most excitingly provide a partnership vehicle that could draw in any underused capacity in sports and leisure facilities in the city owned by other bodies, private, public and charitable so that the opportunities for sports and leisure for the city's residents could be maximized.

Despite proposing such a partnership three years or so ago when the city last conducted a public consultation on the future of the leisure services, they have chosen to go off and do near secret deals with outside bodies that will only provide a fraction of these benefits in their current form. There is no reason why the winning bidders to manage the facilities could not be involved in such a venture - indeed their management and sport development expertise would be quite fundamental.

But since bids have to be in by January 7th there is little chance that such a ground-breaking innovative scheme could be fully worked up in time. The residents of Oxford deserve such an opportunity and not have their assets given away unnecessarily hastily - including, one presumes, facilities such as the recently built Barton Pool into which the city poured our money. The City Council are letting them down most egregiously and we should demand better.

To think, a year or so ago they thought they were capable of taking on education and social services as a unitary authority. It is quite clear that the system of local government in this country is virtually beyond redemption. It needs more innovative thinking. Better models of financing. And a renewed social contract that guarantees that tax-payers' money will be invested wisely, and not given away to save costs a few years later.