• MORE competition is never welcome, so I sympathise with Hassan Shahmiri, owner of Dominique’s coffee shop in South End Green, but since there already is a Starbucks, Le Pain Quotidien and several other coffee shops in the area, I hope the arrival of Pret a Manger won’t be the last straw, (Family businesses fear for future as Pret A Manger makes move on Hampstead, September 5).

But the “spike in rents” – highlighted as a factor in the disappearance of the Monica clothes shop – is a much more serious factor I feel, and one needing urgent action before all our high street shops are destroyed, along with many pubs and other vital premises.

And the key factor in this respect is the ludicrous state of the housing market, where prices have been allowed to soar out of sight, so that even a modest flat in NW3 costs more than 20 times the average salary.

This means that almost all premises are now seen as potential flats, with devastating impact on the whole of our society, as we know from other local stories which see many long-standing pubs fighting for survival. I don’t know where this money is coming from, but it isn’t home grown!

And, while I would love to blame the Tory government for the situation, I well recall Gordon Brown looking dazed when the house-price spiral started in the early years of this century.

But he, too, was scared to do anything about the problem, and the Tories haven’t even thought of trying. Perhaps we need a system as applied decades ago when I went to live in the Netherlands.

Below a certain price level, you could only buy property if you had “economic or social ties” with the town or city where the property was located.

This was probably a hang-over from the war, but we urgently need something to stop the devastation of London as billionaires from around the globe buy their “cash boxes in the sky’, many left empty but still rising in value, leaving no homes for the people who work here and are needed to run London.

I had hoped that Brexit would stop this stupidity but, as the pound plummets, property looks even cheaper from the outside. Will Boris Johnson’s rabble do anything about this massive issue for all families in Britain? I doubt it.

DAVID REED
Eton Avenue, NW3