I read with interest your editorial (21 February) regarding buy-to-let landlords and the injustice faced by renters who are excluded from the prosperity generated by rising property prices and who are funding the comfortable retirements of their landlords.
While the suggestion of extending the right-to-buy scheme to the private sector is, at first glance, interesting, sadly this will not assist those who will never be able to afford to purchase a property. How will an individual receiving the minimum wage be able to afford the deposit required by a mortgage lender? Given that the average mortgage is repaid over 25 years, anyone over the age of 40 is likely to be excluded.
All political parties have avoided the fact that there is a chronic shortage of social housing. The Thatcher administration’s prohibition of local authorities using funds gained from former council tenants who purchased their properties to build new council-owned homes was shortsighted and caused incalculable social harm.
The right to a permanent home is a basic human right and a cross-party issue. Will Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer be willing to accept, and promote, the fact that the only solution to the shortage is the largest programme of social housing construction since the end of the second world war?
Keeley-Jasmine Cavendish
London
• You put the shocking rise in house prices down to a lack of stock coming on to the market. How refreshing that you recognise that this is not due to a shortage of physical homes, but to the rich hoarding homes and to frenetic housebuilding drawing the eye of investors.
Here in south Oxfordshire, the government forces us to build three times more homes than the number of households expected to form, that is, two newly empty dwellings for every one that becomes a home. This has turbocharged the market and prices. Concreting over our land loses us Oxford’s green belt and fragments the landscape. Land lost cannot be restored for nature and regenerative farming.
The Labour party’s intention to ban foreign ownership of new homes should be extended to all homes and further localised: you cannot buy a home in Oxfordshire (old or new) unless you are, or intend to become, a resident.
All homes should be sold for residential purposes only, slowly ending the problem of housing for investment. Some holiday businesses could be enabled by licensing premises for that purpose. This may sound draconian, but it is the only way we can bring down prices and house our people well. Limit the market, do not increase supply.
Dr Sue Roberts
District councillor, South Oxfordshire
• The housing shortage goes back to the Thatcher years and the privatisation of rentals. When she tried to make every tenant Conservative by pushing people to buy their council houses, she left a hole for councils, which she made sure could not be filled with the reductions on the amount that they could charge and the government subsidies that they could draw on. A lot of rough sleepers and plenty of tenants could surely be housed by local authorities – the biggest obstacle is the ideology of the present government.
David Critchlow
Poole, Dorset
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