Mr Kerswell (Readers’ Times, December 23, makes an inaccurate sweeping statement that “the countryside once had a much greater population” and goes on to miss the far more important point that houses without decent jobs are fatal, whatever the motivation or mode of delivery.

Simply building houses solves no problems at all.

If low income families cannot afford housing, even when in regular work, they should withhold their labour until it pays a living wage.

Affordable housing, built to accommodate low earners, condemns them to generations of the same wage blight and subsidises the low payers.

Affordable housing is a selfperpetuating policy with unintended negative outcomes. Those condemned to this marginal life, with taxpayers’ help, live shorter lives, tend to fail educationally and socially and remain unfulfilled, generation after generation.

Mr Kerswell is wrong in his assumption that the low paid are not being accommodated in their home areas.

The affordable housing survey for my area showed 28 families, or individuals, accommodated in private rented housing, with none saying that housing was a problem for them or, that lack of housing stopped them from taking the job they wanted.

So there is enough accommodation and the rent is taken care of by housing benefit.

And where does it say that taxpayers should subsidise the propertyowning ambitions of the low paid?

One of the major principles of housing benefit is that claimants must not live in property owned by a relative as the state does not wish to be seen to be enriching a family. This should apply equally to equity share affordable housing.

Good old fashioned council housing, yes. Nest-lining by the taxpayer, no.

S C BROWN, Bucknell, Herefordshire.