Sir – Your front-page lead story on “the battle to save Oxford’s green spaces” (June 2) could just as easily have been headed “the battle to keep Oxford’s homeless on the streets” or “the battle to ensure people in poor housing stay that way”.

Organisations like the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and their campaign manager Helena Whall, always seek to paint a picture of housing as new and dangerous, yet access to good homes is a basic human right under the United Nations Charter.

Nobody would suggest that Oxford’s green spaces should all be built on willy-nilly, and certainly not on allotments and other well-used green spaces, but nor should the CPRE and their ilk suggest that no green space should ever be built on.

I would urge the CPRE and their supporters to visit Holland, to see how they manage to build thousands of new houses on green land, and yet create vastly superior and greener estates than we ever do in the UK.

Go to their newest city, Almere, and see how thousands of beautiful modern houses have been built on reclaimed land in parkland settings.

Every new house there is below sea level, as is most housing in Holland, yet people frequently (and erroneously in my view) use flood-risk in Oxford to argue against new housing. Modern engineering can counter this risk.

I would have more sympathy for the CPRE if they publicly accepted that Oxford has a huge housing shortage, with thousands of individuals and families on the council waiting list; that thousands of new houses, therefore, have to be built; and that people who own their own homes, most of which were probably built on farmland and other green spaces over the last 130 years, have no moral right to consign those who are homeless, or who live in sub-standard accommodation, to the housing scrapheap for ever.

Stuart Skyte, Oxford