Richard Drax and Simon Bowkett are both right in suggesting the solutions to the ‘Borough’s Toll of Repossessions’ (Echo, August 19) are more highly paid jobs and affordable housing.

These needs are highlighted in the West Dorset and Weymouth and Portland Draft Local Plan.

Frustratingly, neither of them suggests how these aims could be met.

Better paid jobs cannot be conjured up - a long-term strategy is necessary.

That strategy lies in education. While Richard Drax talks up the economic health of the country as a whole, this is not reflected in Weymouth and the new national curriculum will do little to help Weymouth attract the kind of jobs he says we need.

The draft local plan states that a skilled labour shortage is the biggest barrier to economic growth. It also shows that there are well above the national average of young people not in education, employment or training (NEETS). Meanwhile over 75 per cent of teachers have described the new national curriculum as lacking in breadth and failing to address the serious concerns regarding the skills base of the economy as a whole and particularly economies like ours.

The curriculum has been designed by the privileged for whom learning is easy. This does not include our NEETS. To help these young people and to attract higher paid jobs, the curriculum needs to be flexible and appropriate to serve our present population and material assets here in South Dorset.

Meanwhile, recent news has shown that housing developers will do all they can to wriggle out of building the affordable housing quotas required of them by planning law. The only way to bring the cost of housing down for those most vulnerable to repossession is by increasing the council housing stock.

Did Richard Drax and Simon Bowkett forget to explain how they would achieve their laudable aims?

Or did they think your readers would swallow state-ments of what is already known, and national figures and sound bites, as satisfactory answers to a pressingly urgent local problem?

Jane Burnet, Green Party Parliamentary Candidate