Keeping pace with a rising demand for houses

SIR – The Government has a target of building around 250,000 homes each year.

Dame Kate Barker, a leading expert on the subject, has pinpointed one of the major factors raising demand – huge immigration. On the basis of around 300,000 net immigrants a year, and assuming an average occupancy of three people per property, some 100,000 houses are needed every year just to keep pace with this demand. Nigel Williams

Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire

SIR – No government will solve Britain’s housing problem until it understands this simple proposition: that most people in the 21st century want to live and work in cities and large towns.

That means that cities and large towns need to expand, something that UK planning law has sought to prevent since 1947.

That in turn means that a government really seeking to solve the housing problem must identify thousands of acres adjacent to existing large urban areas – in what is now called the Green Belt – where planned construction of housing can begin. Tinkering with the Green Belt, and talk of brownfield sites and garden cities, will never solve the problem.

England will still be a green and pleasant land, but cities need to grow. Richard Jenkins

Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire

SIR – It seems to me that the housing crisis could be solved quite easily if the Green Belt were not considered sacrosanct.

Planning permission should be granted for three months, provided that really affordable properties (not more than 60 per cent of the market value) should occupy 50 per cent of the land, with a specified proportion set aside for family housing.

Should work not be started within three months of permission being granted, then the permission should be revoked and the land sold back to the Government with a discount of a least 15 per cent of the price paid.

Such a strategy would get a Tory government elected almost immediately, but it would also tread on a few toes. Norman Balon

London NW11