Illustration by John Sadler www.johnsadlerillustration.com 

• I DO commend the intentions of Labour councillors in building more social housing after successive Tory, Lib Dem and to some extent Labour governments have squeezed the life out of it.

But to build homes on any available patch of council land (Town Hall’s list of small patches of estate land to build on, July 7) is to permanently injure the urban quality of life for all of us.

Over the past 40 years the economy has expanded, and yet living spaces for the vast majority have shrunk.

This is because the benefits of the expanded economy, instead of trickling down to us all, have been grabbed by a small, anti-social and apparently insatiable group – the super rich banks, corporates. With the protection of politicians we voted in, their wealth has multiplied – even more so during the pandemic.

Why should we be permanently crammed together like sardines while thousands of flats owned by dodgy and sometimes downright criminal money-laundering investors lie empty as they accrue eye-watering value? Surely such homes should be seized.

The Labour councillors and their party at a national level could better perhaps divert their energies from scratching around for patches of land to house more of us poor sardines and address themselves to devising policies and campaign strategies to bring down a regime that will eventually immiserate all but a select group of the super rich.

D WARD, NW1