Sir – Reading Reg Little’s feature on the dilemma facing the Town Hall as a result of the Government’s right-to-buy proposals (March 22), I was undecided whether the most effective metaphor for the Government’s proposals was ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’ or ‘putting the cart before the horse’.

Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic because this country faces a severe affordable housing shortage — doubly acute in Oxford because of the shortage of building land.

Selling council houses will do nothing to deal with the housing shortage: rather it will decrease the supply of affordable family housing.

Recycling the receipts into new affordable housing locally runs up against the difficulties of developing new affordable housing in Oxford.

A symbol of these difficulties is the CPRE’s defence of both the Green Belt and undeveloped land within the city. The sensible course, if council houses must be sold, is to build new ones before selling them off.

Which brings me to putting the cart before the horse. Sale of council houses and the NewBuy Guarantee Scheme seek to increase demand for housing rather than supplying the shortage.

A basic economic textbook will tell you that this is correct: demand for a product encourages businesses to supply it.

Unfortunately, as pre-crash years of soaring house prices met by relatively small increases in housing completions have shown, the basic laws of economics do not apply to the British housing market, in which house prices are still heavily overvalued in historic terms.

A planning system which favours the status quo over both the market and housing need maintains this.

At a time of record low interest rates, the opportunity exists to carry out a house-building programme of affordable housing, increasing supply.

Conservatives should reach back to Super-Mac’s pledge to build 300,000 houses per year.

Henry Brougham, Kidlington