Sir -- The stark choice, Green Belt or Homes, you presented (Oxford Mail, July 2) is not quite as stark as you make out.

It leaves out some significant options and begs several important questions crucial to accurate long-term planning.

First, "21,000 new homes needed over the next 12 years" relies on estimates produced for Oxford City Council by a specialist firm.

Its report reveals that most of them will be for people already accommodated in the city somehow.

Where they live now may not be suitable, it may be expensive and the "wrong sort" -- too large.

But if you move someone out of a room in one house in the city and into a room in another, there is no additional need for bedspaces overall.

What we need is a redistribution of existing bedspaces into more contemporary household sizes as much as additional development.

This can really be achieved long term only by a programme of rolling replacement of the housing stock, giving significant opportunities to increase densities closer to those the city planners were celebrating achieving on recent schemes.

We have become the crumbling wreck of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Britain, with such a slow housing replacement rate that recent research suggests houses built today will have to stand for 2,800 years before they are replaced.

Until such radical options are investigated, Green Belt development might be too hasty.

JOCK COATS

Morrell Hall

Oxford