Keeping a spare room

SIR – The elderly are encouraged to enjoy an active social life in order to avoid feeling isolated.

How does this square with the Government’s attempts to encourage them downsize? Doing this would leave them unable to have friends and family to stay.

It is unfair to use the elderly as an excuse for insufficient housing. Pam Maybury

Bath, Somerset

SIR – There are thousands of houses in this country that are unavailable for permanent occupation because they are being rented out as holiday homes.

This is particularly the case in Cornwall, where some seaside villages are almost all either holiday lets or second homes. I realise tourism is Cornwall’s biggest industry, but it is getting beyond a joke. Walking round the old part of St Ives last year, I found that three quarters of the cottages seemed to be holiday lets.

I must confess to some hypocrisy here, as over the years I have stayed in holiday cottages in various parts of the country. However, the situation is now so serious that county councils need to put a cap on the number of houses being used for the tourist trade.

In Cornwall, holiday lets and second homes have reduced the number of houses available to buy, pushing up prices so much that ordinary Cornish people (whose wages are well below the national average) cannot afford to buy houses in their own county. Christine Simmonds

Redruth, Cornwall