Eco-houses are an essential invention for the future, but eco-towns are a move in the wrong direction.

What is needed most are a few eco-houses on the edge of every village in the UK.

It makes more sense to add to existing stable communities rather than try to create huge new towns, where real communities rarely exist.

People do not care about one another in towns as they do in villages. In towns, there is far more crime because people become so 'anonymous'.

Smaller communities are much healthier for people to live in, both physically and mentally.

For many years, children of villagers have longed for housing so that they can stay in the community they grew up in and be able to care for and be near their extended family and to keep their villages alive.

There is no reason why houses built in villages cannot be eco-friendly. We also need more council houses.

Ironically, too, eco-towns - especially the proposed Weston Otmoor - defeat the whole object of saving the ecology by the fact that huge areas of green ecology would have to be destroyed to provide the space for them to be built on.

Where is the sense in that?

It seems to me that far from benefiting mankind or the ecology, they have been thought up for only a few people's personal fame and fortune - architects, planners, politicians and property developers.

PAMELA WEBBER Bullingdon Road Oxford