CLLR Ed Turner knows full well that when the Greens abstain on Labour’s proposals for housing it’s because we can’t support proposals that squander opportunities, creating a worse crisis down the line. Labour have presided over a period of rocketing rents, increasing rough sleeping, and are now starting to house our vulnerable people in Birmingham. It’s not working.

Greens got the council to agree that 50 per cent of housing on new developments should be ‘affordable’, but Labour caved in to developers and reduced that to 40 per cent on New Barton. It is the Greens putting forward concrete proposals for buying and building new council stock, and who put this in their 2014 budget.

Labour’s ‘solution’ is to allow developers to build second-quality new houses on precious green belt for sale on the open market to people who can afford them (new London commuters?), leaving many of the most vulnerably housed in Oxford still looking on.

Labour have forgotten their own history. Nationally, they still support the disastrous ‘right to buy’ policy. Surely they can see that the ‘free market’ will never provide homes in Oxford for the working poor; indeed the process of pushing them out has already started.

I’m fed up with visiting young families either living apart or trying to live in one expensive room. Oxford can do better. Instead of playing political word games, Ed, demonstrate that Labour are really serious about increasing the council housing stock, and you’ll get my full support.

DICK WOLFF, Green Party candidate for St Mary's Ward (city council), Victoria Road, Oxford