Your correspondent James Young suggests (I think) that the Government should tell mortgage providers to lend a lower multiple of household incomes than the present typical multiple of three/ four times income so fewer people can get a good enough mortgage to buy and so demand and prices fall.

This is neither practical nor any kind of answer to the housing crisis. Irresponsible lending of up to seven times salary has already stopped.

The problem now is the opposite. Because lenders lend much less than 100 per cent of the purchase price, first-time buyers need to have large deposits but may not be able to save up for them because of high rents.

In any case house prices are 8-10 times wages, so completely unaffordable to very many people.

Building more open market homes is not an answer nor is excluding yet more people from being able to buy by making mortgages less available.

Mrs Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy wasn’t just a right to buy, it used hard-won public funds to discount sales prices by up to 70 per cent.

There were 6.5million affordable homes in 1980. Today there are just two million. Expensive private renting is up from 2m to 5.4m.

Up to 1980 we were building around 300,000 homes a year, at least a third of them council homes.

Now around 150,000pa are built, but only ten per cent affordable. Since 2012, 54,000 more council homes have been sold at high discounts: only 12,000 new ones were built.

The acute need is for many more council or housing association rented homes at 40-60 per cent market rents, not on the Government’s unfair “affordable” definition of 80 per cent market rent.

If we still had the 6.5 million truly affordable homes we would have a more equal society and many more people could afford to save up for home ownership if they want to.

It took 80 years to build 6.5million homes. It’ll take many years to restore what has been lost but we need to start. Much much larger programmes of building socially rented homes are urgently needed.

All progressive political parties should be joining together to make this happen.

Stephen Bendle
Beech Road, Weymouth