• IN Cllr Danny Beales’s interview (CNJ, August 4) he compared the housing waiting list to the NHS’s.

There will always be people joining both so the work of people like Cllr Beales and the NHS is never done. I guess were meant to think that he is a public servant like an NHS worker who deserves our applause.

If we are honest, the Community Investment Programme for which he is responsible hasn’t made a dent in Camden’s housing list.

Camden’s figures published last November state it has built 252 council rent homes “for people on the housing register” since 2010.

The waiting list according to the Office for National Statistics stood at 7,062 last year and has more than doubled since 2017 when, incidentally, Cllr Beales took office.

Earlier this year Cllr Siân Berry used ONS figures to show that 533 council homes have been demolished in Camden since 2012 and another 577 have been lost to Right To Buy. She shows we’re actually going backwards which he, of course, does not acknowledge.

An NHS administrator who didn’t acknowledge an increasing mortality rate wouldn’t be considered so much a public servant as a public liability.

If you are on Camden’s waiting list, the projected numbers of additional council homes (above replacement) from Camden’s big estate “regeneration” schemes like West Kentish Town, Agar Grove, Wendling and Bacton Low Rise are not encouraging: respectively- 13, six, six, and 20.

With the total cost of all four schemes coming in considerably over £1billion, the addition of just 45 council homes above replacement is obviously very poor. None of the schemes is yet complete.

The in-depth story of the CIP – its promises and chaotic delivery – remains to be told in detail with hard facts.

When it is, the political project Cllr Beales and his kind are involved with will come into stark relief as shabby careerism entailing a vast waste of public resources and massive disruption to neighbourhoods and people’s lives for scant return.

This is a summer for chancers: Truss, Sunak and Beales. It’s showtime and it makes no sense.

TOM YOUNG, NW5