• YOUR Comment is quite right but possibly for the wrong reason, (We can’t keep relying on the property market to bail us out, September 13).

In my view this has nothing to do with Brexit. A decade ago someone asked me to check out one-bed flats in this area and the result was roughly £135,000 to £175,000. Now the cost is approximately double.

If this goes on, as some assume it will, in around 25 years, such a flat will be worth £1million. But people are beginning to realise that this is all a bit like “tulip mania”, the famous bubble in the 17th century, which may have been the first of the great collapses.

There is no logic for a very ordinary pile of bricks and mortar in Camden to be worth this sort of sum. In the 1950s and 1960s, the market worked well when people striving to get on the ladder had to struggle with a mortgage of 2.5 times their salary. But it was manageable. This market has now become absurd.

We are facing a possible crisis of negative equity and the authorities must put their attention to what lies ahead. My greatest concern is for housing associations who have borrowed on the basis of the current value of their housing stock.

I attended the AGM of the newly-merged Notting Hill Genesis HA and they seem to be in denial. They have just taken out a bond for £400million and are trying to get another £500million from the European Investment Bank. Yet they have been told not to bank on a bail out. We are in a very big mess.

PETER RUTHERFORD
NW6