Sir – It is time the Government stopped its Stalinist thinking. Affordable housing cannot be centrally-planned.

It needs to be wanted, needed, designed for, and controlled by the local community in order to have a sense of place which no big estate development can ever create.

Eight hundred small schemes in villages, towns and urban areas, run by local community land trusts, would supply the same number of homes without destroying the Green Belt, and create places where people relate to their neighbours and are proud to be involved in managing where they live. It is significant that all 200 of such trusts in America have only had two repossessions in the recent crisis; and Stonesfield Community Trust has only had two one-month voids in 20 years — because it knows its tenants and their family backgrounds and their needs.

At present, the housing associations which have been built into Government-funded big developers are in financial difficulties because the shared-ownership properties they have produced aren’t selling.

When they have dumped 8,000 houses on Grenoble Road and no one wants to buy them, either because they can’t get mortgages or because they don’t want to live next to Blackbird Leys, will taxpayers be asked to bail out another policy disaster?

Tony Crofts, Chairman, Stonesfield Community Trust. Stonesfield