I WAS very interested in the news that I read in the latest edition of "Bolton Scene", describing how our Golf Course at Regent Park is to be transformed.

This last year, just after the course was leased to the "consortium of business investors" for a period of 30 years, our annual fee for playing the course was increased by 50 per cent. Can you imagine the outcry if prices generally were increased, at a stroke, by this amount?

Now we are to have a new clubhouse, showers, improved dining facilities, new shop, and the only automatic driving range in the country, all of which are peripheral to the game of golf and do little to improve the lot of the pensioner player. It would seem that these facilities have been built, largely under the direction of a commercial group, to extract yet even more money from the many pensioners who use the course at the moment and I am certain that they have not been demanded .

The members of the Bolton Council have passed over a valuable and unique asset to the private sector. Not that we need another private course in Bolton -- we already have 10 within five miles of the Town Hall.

Come clean, Cllr Haworth, have you built into the deal any questions of the cost of a round, or even mentioned the possible costs of a year's contract?

I am writing this more in anger than hope, as I am certain that, even if they know the answer, they will be too ashamed to answer.

W P Marfleet

Crompton Way

Bolton