Madam,

Adequate, affordable housing is essential for human contentment. If owner-occupied, its price needs to reflect a bearable cost to the average budget, and likewise if rented. When 39 per cent of homes bought in Gwynedd in 2017 were second homes or buy-to-let the first-time buyer is heavily outpriced in a rigged and squeezed market.

It is rigged by the building companies, who have large land holdings, but regulate their building programmes to keep prices high, and it has been rigged by recent Tory and New Labour governments.

In his memoirs, Nick Clegg revealed that either Osborne or Cameron said, “Why build council houses, when it only creates Labour voters?”

A Bullingdon boy indeed, whose fraternal friends live in grand, landed properties, with their own vested interest in a buoyant housing market. An incestuous relationship that holds the nation to ransom, increasingly at the mercy of high property prices, modern day Rackmans, and exorbitant rents.

Theresa May tries to steal Labour’s clothes, and promises to allow councils to build again, after decades of Thatcherite constraint, but the emphasis appears to be upon ‘affordable’ owner-occupied housing, rather than rented social housing. In an age of mass minimum wage employment, a consequence of mass immigration, there will be an awful lot of disappointed, aspiring owner-occupiers.

There now would seem to be collusion between Government policy and mortgage providers, for lenders are increasingly refusing to finance buy-to-let properties occupied by tenants that receive housing benefit.

In contrast, the government’s discredited Help to Buy scheme offers substantial interest-free loans to first-time owners or home-movers, and at 20 per cent of a maximum purchase price of £600,000, such loans simply drive prices higher.

When the inevitable market correction occurs, the borrower is cruelly exposed to negative equity, but the building company has received top price, courtesy of political friends in high places.

A substantial number of those ‘political friends’ will be among the 20 per cent of MPs who are landlords, a further twist to an incestuous relationship.

Yours etc,

R Louvet, Llanfrothen.

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