I cannot believe Vale council wants to impose infrastructure costs of more than £300,000 on the Vanderbilt development in Wantage. I campaigned to stop the unnecessary demolition of the James Heating/Blanchard building and the proposed number of flats appears to be a gross overdevelopment of the site.

However, to expect developers to contribute substantial amounts of money to subsidise infrastructure that should be the responsibility of local and central government is tantamount to creating an insidious arrangement between developers and local authorities that is against the interest of the local community in that it allows developers to rule the roost in planning matters.

Also, why should developers provide 40 per cent affordable housing? Reducing their costs would help to keep all their housing affordable. Why should hard working youngsters trying to get a foot on the property ladder have to pay inflated prices to developers in order to subsidise housing often destined for those who are of a less hard working nature?

In the 1950s both Labour and Conservatives built millions of social houses directly from government funding. Nowadays, governments avoid paying for hospitals, power stations, schools and housing either using costly privatisation or loading future costs onto consumers.

Today’s letters

Even so, they still seem unable to reduce the huge national deficit and debt, the interest of which is now running at about half of the health budget.

It would be more sensible for the government and local authorities to adopt a policy of putting infrastructure into place before allowing development to go ahead. What they are doing now is no better than living ‘on tick’.

Terry Randall, Grove Street, Wantage

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