We are facing a huge housing crisis

IT is clear to all that we face a huge housing crisis. We have not built enough homes, it is as simple as that.

We underbuilt as a nation by 100,000 homes a year for decades. We probably have a shortfall of around two million homes across the country. In Bristol, we probably have a shortfall of around 20,000 homes.

The key issue is land: where can we build these things? You can only do so much with infill and smallscale stuff.

Repurposing retail shops into flats will help a bit. But you must have mass scale building to make a dent in all this. Anyone who ignores this doesn’t understand the basic economics. And if you’re going to build the homes, we need the land – and the transport links.

Bristol needs to grow and the homes have got to go somewhere.

So a good bit of building would really be in order, and MetroBus can help whisk people to their new homes. This is much better than having empty land lying around.

It’s time to get building to solve Bristol’s housing crisis. That must mean new settlements on the outskirts and good transport links into town.

Much better to spend the £4bn on housing and not on a Chinese metro, especially since the virus probably came from China one way or another and it was then covered up.

If needs be, have compulsory land orders to get builders building on their landbanks, or they then lose the planning permissions they have been granted. This is a failure of the housing and planning system to work properly.

Sarah Martin Bristol