Letter of the week: Building Britain’s future

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Anoosh Chakelian’s Cover Story (6 June) depressingly explains how poorly houses are being built in the UK and how few protections buyers have. Setting this against the government’s aim of building 1.5 million homes in its first term, the problem is even more concerning. House-building needs to be changed to meet that target and create better houses. We need to look more creatively at high-density housing to avoid acres of identikit suburbs. (One model could be the Montreal development, Habitat 67: rather than towers it formed a landscape of housing units, hills and vales.) We also need bigger houses to reduce the number of moves, so people can stay longer and build communities. Cladding in timber and materials other than brick would reduce cement manufacture and lock in carbon.

Such changes would be a true revolution, make real change and reconfigure housing for a better future. It might even enable the government to build 1.5 million homes, some of them council houses. We need homes for the future, not houses looking back to the past.
David Cockayne, Cheshire

Home to roost

Congratulations to Anoosh Chakelian for highlighting the lousy quality of much of our new housing (Cover Story, 6 June). We need to build many more new homes, particularly affordable ones. But the assumption that weakening the planning system will magic up the homes we need is deeply flawed. Planning liberalisation, promoted over the past 20 years by developer-funded think tanks, is viewed as a panacea by many on the centre-left. But as Chakelian suggests, we need more planning and better-enforced building standards, not less. Let’s build – but let’s build homes people will want to live in and ones we can be proud in years to come.
Shaun Spiers, executive director, Green Alliance

Stocks and scares

The UK government, with its own currency, need not “balance the books” (Leader, 6 June), as the late economist John Weeks and others have made clear. The 2008 crisis, for example, was born not from public debt but from the unbridled growth in private-sector debt. The warning sign was the acceleration in lending.

Refusing to provide “greater funding” is a political choice by Rachel Reeves. The Treasury has acknowledged there is no aspect of the government’s banking arrangements that can prevent government expenditure from being realised once it has been authorised by parliament – with its large majority, it should be easy for Labour.

The British government is not exposed to the risks of “running out of money”, defaulting on debt obligations, the sentiments of bond markets or a need to reduce levels of government debt below those demanded by the economy. The government can and should spend to invest. Angela Rayner’s housing project would be a good place to start.
David Murray, Wallington, Surrey

In defence of Healey

Jason Cowley rightly praises John Healey’s personal integrity and his commitment, manifest in the Defence Review, to improving the living conditions and terms of service personnel (Newsmaker, 6 June). That is both right and fundamental: if service personnel are not looked after, they will – as they are at the moment – leave at a faster rate than recruitment can replenish.

The Prime Minister may aim to turn the UK into “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation”. But the resources that Healey will have at his disposable – 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 – will probably only, as the head of the German Armed Forces put it describing Olaf Scholz’s similarly miserly defence increase, “fill the potholes”. To meet our security and defence needs, as Cowley points out, will require something more akin to the proposed Nato targets: 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence, and a further 1.5 per cent on defence infrastructure, and it needs to happen sooner than sometime after 2030.

Money, however, is not everything. If, as Keir Starmer said at Govan shipyards earlier this month, this is about “everyone playing their role… Doing their duty to the nation and to each other to preserve our way of life” – a national effort, in other words – then a lot more storytelling will be required. The Prime Minister has lit the rhetorical touch paper. I’m not sure he is clear where the firework is going to go off. I wish John Healey luck.
Simon Diggins, retired colonel, Rickmansworth

Solving inequalities

In his excellent letter in response to the Gordon Brown guest edit on child poverty, John Lowell asks “What has happened?” (Correspondence, 6 June). The answer is quite simple: a huge growth in inequality. Richard Wilkinson has produced overwhelming evidence over the past 20 years that inequality is the main driver of most of our current societal crises: poverty, declining mental and physical health, homelessness and so on. The Tories and the right-wing media endorse growing inequality as a necessary corollary to higher economic growth. The rest of us know that this is false. And so do the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank. These bodies have publicly stated that growing inequality constrains growth. That makes reducing inequality an economic imperative, not just a moral one.

I am certain Rachel Reeves knows this too. The challenge for the Labour leadership is how to combat the hysteria of the Daily Mail et al around the fear that, among other things, if we pursue redistributive policies, we might find billionaires fleeing from the UK. If the IMF does not see this as an economic problem, then why should we?
Dick Brown, Buxted, East Sussex

F-AI-rweather friend?

I read Megan Nolan’s article (Personal Story, 6 June) with interest and agreement. This new tech kid on the block has us all rattled, and not in a good way. Nolan is correct that no one wants an AI bot pretending to be their best friend. Friends in the real world offer sane and sensible advice, proffer help and bequeath solidarity when all the world appears to be against one. Nolan’s own friendships, which she writes so well about, are down to Earth, proactive and sustaining, not like the sycophantic ones conceived in Silicon Valley.
Judith Daniels, Norfolk

Lawless lands

Megan Gibson rightly states much more should have been done by the international community much earlier in respect to the Netanyahu regime’s policy on Gaza (World View, 6 June). Israel has not just flouted international law, but violated the four fundamental aspects of it. These are the Genocide Convention; international humanitarian law (IHL), which covers war crimes; treaties concerning nuclear weapons, which cover the development, testing and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and the UN Charter on interventionist actions against sovereign states.

The Genocide Convention, for example, condemns “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. And blockades that prevent the flow of medical and food supplies are in direct violation of IHL.

International law either needs to mean everything or nothing. Failure to enforce it is a stain on the conscience of those with influence, just as their negligence (or complicity) has been from the onset.
Jordan Scott, Newcastle upon Tyne

Wealth vs health

One can only share Rachel Clarke’s incredulity and disgust at the deprioritisation of certain patients and agree with her that the NHS needs greater investment, not less (Health Matters, 6 June). The same applies to social care, especially for those with dementia. The government has announced instead another inquiry because it can’t face up to the cost of fair and proper public provision.

There is one obvious solution for these problems. The Chancellor should gracefully tell us that she only meant she would not increase taxes on working people, and that now is the time to tax wealth. Properly done, wouldn’t that also be a way to solve a lot of other problems too?
Michael Chanan, Windsor

Rachel Clarke, in her profoundly sad but excellent article, uses one term with which I find myself in disagreement: “deficit”. Deficit would be appropriate if the NHS were a business, but the clue is in the name. It is a “service” and it is – and has been for years – underfunded. Were it a business, it wouldn’t do hip replacements after old people break the neck of their femur; a business could say, “Why bother, they’re going to die soon anyway?”

The NHS needs to be properly funded and we need to tell the truth about how that needs to be done: a properly calculated progressive system of taxation. I’m old enough to remember the time before the NHS. We do not want to go back to anything like that.
Jim Maloney, Wigan

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