Madam,

Your reporter says that Gwynedd’s Cabinet member for housing, Craig ab Iago, “agreed that local people should be given (housing) priority” (‘Call to give locals priority for social housing’, 18 October).

The full position of the Plaid Council may be difficult to encapsulate in a few newspaper sentences, but ab Iago is quoted as saying he favours an allocative system for social housing “on the basis of ethnic group, language and local communities”.

Cllr Sion Jones is, incredibly, a Labour Party Gwynedd councillor, indeed, the only one. You report him as “fed up" with social housing in Bethel going to “people outside the area” who may not be Welsh-speaking, have no “interest in learning the language and don’t contribute anything to the community”.

Bethel is a very small part of Gwynedd, for all of which ab Iago has responsibility. Both these councillors seem to me to be making a mistake.

They are putting the interests of the many, i.e members of Cymraeg communities, over those of the desperate few, i.e outsiders who seek housing there. We should always try to improve the welfare of the worst-off. And that means giving existing vacant houses in Bethel to those most in need, and building houses in the numbers required where they are most needed.

If the people of Bethel asking for social housing in Bethel are the poorest and in the worst housing circumstances then they should be rehoused. But if the most poorly housed poorest families are elsewhere in Gwynedd then they have the right to be rehoused in Bethel.

Had we a humane government in London there would be money enough in the coffers of the Welsh Government to provide adequate housing for all.

As it is, there is a crisis in housing across the country and in a crisis the worst-off must be protected.

The crisis is so deep that Liz Saville Roberts’ “concern about the impact of second homes in Gwynedd” would, perhaps, provide an answer had we communitarian states of mind associated with previous national crises. For then there would surely be a widespread call for selected sequestration of at least a few of those second, and sometimes third or fourth homes, that are owned by the very richest, the properties to be lived in by those who have none. Indeed, that may be a part of the pattern of any genuine and thorough-going redistribution of income and wealth, to bring true economic equality to these islands. It would also reduce the house building requirement for Wales.

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, Shelbourne Court, Barmouth.

Have your say on the local issues affecting you - email [email protected] or join in the conversation on our Facebook page