Spare a thought for the younger generation over housing

Send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Theresa May delivered a major – and widely criticised – speech on the state of housing in the UK (BBC)

About 50 years ago, as a low-ranking service airman, I was able to buy my first small house for £3000 on a new estate near Lincoln.

I was able to afford this first step because your mortgage was limited to three times your salary. This had the effect of keeping house prices in line with this cap.

Since this restriction was lifted, house prices went up as the greed ethos crept in.

I moved as I left the service and sold my house for 10 times the purchase price, and bought in Hampshire with an endowment policy. After this matured I was able to retire and sell for 100 per cent over my original purchase price.

I was lucky.

I feel sorry for the young ones who have been caught in this government-inspired trap and have little hope of making that first step on the housing ladder.

JP Mac Wood

Lincoln

If people had fewer kids there wouldn’t be such an urgent need to build on Greenfield sites. Just a thought.

Ellen Jackson
Poole

Brexit plans are looking as stable as a house without foundations

I said on 29 March last year that I would pull down my existing house and replace it with a new one in two years’ time. One year on I have no planning permission, as I am yet to submit detailed structural plans for the new house.

However, my stated intention is an ambitious new build with an entirely novel appearance. It will be in accordance with building regulations and built to the highest possible standards. It will be environmentally friendly and carbon neutral and will be fitted with the latest digital technology.

I have no idea where I will live when my house is pulled down or how the project will be financed. Some might say, as things stand, my dream is foolish and an act of gross folly.

This is a comparable position to this Tory Government’s Brexit project.

Maurizio Moore
Brentwood

Don’t blame baby boomers for not paying enough tax, blame the Government for not properly collecting it

Baby boomers keep getting blamed for surviving post-war austerity (that was far worse than the current situation), working hard so that they “never had it so good”, and accruing property wealth that, in most cases, will be passed down to their children and grandchildren.

So given that it was Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Conservative governments which progressively reduced the basic rate of income tax from 33 per cent to 23 per cent, it is a bit rich when former minister David Willetts adds what some might see as a note of depreciation.

Many boomers would have been happy to pay higher rates of direct tax to maintain the NHS, social care, children’s education and so on, and regret that these areas are currently suffering funding problems. They are also painfully aware of the financial difficulties that their offspring’s offspring are experiencing.

If governments took their heads out of the sand, were cognizant of the census data that they collect and were to plan ahead appropriately, the nation would not be in need of dire warnings such as those of Lord Willetts.

Ian Reid
Kilnwick

It is probably right that the baby boomers contribute more to the tax take, but I certainly would feel better if many large corporations paid their fair share, and tax havens were raided.

Also, I have read that as many billions as have been taken out of the economy during austerity have been paid in bankers bonuses during that time. Take some more tax from this source?

Michael Hale
Stourbridge

Roger Bannister inspired young runners, but it was others who heralded a new age

Even as Roger Bannister was electrifying the public and inspiring young runners heading for international status, the age of the amateur was already passing. In spite of his performance at Oxford and at both the Empire and European games later that summer, the arrival of the Russian full-timer Vladimir Kuts heralded a new age.

The domination of Herb Elliot and Peter Snell in the early 1960s meant that the all-day training of Antipodean coaches Percy Cerutty and Arthur Lydiard replaced Franz Stampfl's high-intensity interval training, which had allowed Bannister and later Ming Campbell to pursue exacting professional careers whilst competing.

John Cameron
St Andrews

We need to look at other sources for gas, and the UK could be one

James Moore’s business comment piece of Friday 2 March, (National Grid ends gas supply warning, but in long term we need to use less of the stuff), is interesting, and surprisingly there are parts I agree with – and unsurprisingly, parts that I don’t.

UK Onshore Oil and Gas’s main point is that if you look at our power and heating needs, there have been some days this week that gas has reached 80 per cent of our total demand.

A large and growing dependence on imports for that gas has a number of consequences: it creates no jobs, taxes or other benefits for the country; it is environmentally more damaging and, as we saw, it does make us vulnerable, particularly when it’s cold. So it does make sense to extract our own gas.

I do agree with James’s view that we need to look at other things – we have always been an advocate for a diverse and balanced energy mix. But we need to make sure we understand the consequences – hydrogen is a good idea; before North Sea gas we had town gas, which had around 50 per cent hydrogen content.

However, James fails to mention that the only economically viable way of producing hydrogen is by creating it from methane, also known as natural gas, so we still come back to the question of where we get the gas from.

Electric heating could also be used, but we have to understand that pulling out the 22 million gas boilers from the 84 per cent of homes with gas and replacing all the cookers and fires is no mean feat – at 2,000 a day, it would take nearly 30 years.

We also need to understand that electric heating is much more expensive than using gas, and today gas provides nearly 50 per cent of our electricity – so we still come back to where we get this gas from.

This ignores of course all of the other good things that come from gas, like products that go into solar panels, wind turbines, heart valves and so on.

As James Moore points out, there are no easy solutions – all have long time frames in which to deliver; all of them have risks. But that gives us even more reason to seek a number of solutions, and one of them is to explore for and produce the gas that lies under our feet.

Ken Cronin
UK Onshore Oil & Gas