Sir – The cover story last week (Student policy labelled sham), the report on page 30 about a couple being evicted due to new rules on houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), and Sarah Wild’s point (Letters) about Brookes selling student residential halls, make telling counterpoints.

Excessive studentification in East Oxford and Headington has raised residents’ anger to the extent that many now see all rented accommodation, for students or professionals, as a threat, and all landlords pariahs.

Brookes is the main player in eastern Oxford, and while grabbing land to build more resident halls, is also selling them off! So students are still driven into family housing — a pressure readily exploited by some landlords who can get more money cramming five students into a three-bedroom house than letting to a family. That is a genuine HMO!

Students are transients, but many other private tenants, notably young professionals, are not. They live and frequently work in Oxford, and are part of the balanced community that the council and residents’ groups claim to support. Yet they are increasingly squeezed by the council’s draconian HMO rules that now extend to just three people sharing.

Why a couple plus a friend in a shared house have to be treated like students in overcrowded bedsits only the council knows, and Bob Price’s remarks on the displaced couple in the report were painfully insensitive. His attitude is arrogant and confrontational, and it doesn’t cross his mind that landlords might not want to pay the council’s new inspection tax, thus keeping the rent lower for their tenants. He avoids mentioning the £400 cost just to be inspected and told to ‘make the small changes necessary’ (if any!).

Many of us, as I did, lived in shared houses when younger. Today’s twentysomethings should be allowed to do likewise.

Dr Anthony Cheke , Hurst Street, Oxford