BOB TOWNER, the former housing officer, was bound to peddle the myth that Barratts and other housebuilders have no problems with affordable housing requirements (Letters, February 12).

All housebuilders have a problem with any demand on them that causes difficulties, costs money and reduces profitability. The biggest problem by far is the affordable housing obligation. Of course it suits left-wing councillors and officers (and ex-officers) to portray it as a mortgage problem, or a bank finance problem, or a land cost problem, but never as a problem of their ridiculous unworkable policies which have failed over the past eight years, and are set to fail yet more disastrously.

You cannot force private builders to build if they don’t think it is worthwhile and you cannot force freehold owners to sell their holdings at knock-down prices.

I do not nit-pick the council’s latest proposals. I condemn them utterly as a disaster.

All my previous predictions have come true and I will be proved right again. There is no prospect of any significant upturn in housebuilding under the current punitive regime.

Matthew Laverack, Lord Mayor’s Walk, York.