Sir – Damian Fantato’s analysis of the housing situation in Oxford and Oxfordshire (January 17) is profoundly depressing.
Carried to its logical conclusion, we shall go on concreting over Oxfordshire until it is a single conurbation stretching from Thame to Chipping Norton. This is not what people living in any of the county’s districts want.
We enjoy living here because the towns are on a human scale and the countryside is easily accessible. We risk jettisoning the very things we most prize.
There is not a housing crisis: there is a housing distribution crisis. Its causes include the buy-to-let boom; increasing student numbers; second-home ownership; and foreign millionaires and companies buying property for tax avoidance. These last two deprive people who live and work in Oxfordshire of valuable housing stock; the first makes it very difficult for many people to buy a house of their own. And all of these factors inflate house prices.
There is also pressure from people and businesses wanting to move to Oxfordshire and this, in turn, is due to the sticky spider web of London. The south-east is already overcrowded, its infrastructure overstretched, its most productive farmland vanishing and its towns experiencing increasingly catastrophic flooding.
The long-term solution would be for central government to incentivise the relocation of employment to less stressed areas of the country. It could relocate the seat of government itself, perhaps to the north-west, which, unlike the south-east, is not threatened by rising sea levels and coastal erosion.
But, by whatever means, we must reverse the ratchet which is cramming more and more people into the most over-populated part of the UK. The demand for ever more building is unsustainable, certainly in the long term and increasingly in the medium and short term too.
Dr Katy Jennison, Witney