THE current proposal to redevelop Cuerden Church Primary School, Bamber Bridge, and Bamber Bridge Methodist Church as a combined school and worship centre raises a matter of major public concern: the demolition of a new classroom extension built only four years ago.

The extension cost £68,486. It seems to me that to demolish a building provided at such high cost after only four years' use is a gross waste of public money.

The extension was provided in response to the Government's 1998 initiative to reduce class sizes for Key Stage 1 pupils and the funding for it came, not from Lancashire County Council as local education authority, but from central government as a 100 per cent DfES Standards Fund grant.

However, the source of the funding is immaterial: that money came from the pockets of taxpayers and must not in my view be squandered in the way now proposed.

It may be suggested that demolition of the extension is inevitable since at the time it was built, there were no plans to amalgamate Bamber Bridge Methodist Primary School and St Saviour's CE Primary School and that the circumstances leading to the proposed demolition of the extension could not have been foreseen. I suggest that the decrepit state of the existing Methodist school and church, built more than a hundred years ago, has been apparent for many years even to a casual eye and that replacement has long been an obvious necessity.

Did no one have the vision to see that?

I, therefore, suggest that the plans should be revised to incorporate the classroom extension as part of the new school, thus avoiding the waste of £68,486 of public money. And I invite the governors to do so forthwith.

Tom Sharratt, County Councillor for South Ribble East, Coupe Green, Hoghton.