PLEASE allow me to inform your readers of a remarkable report published towards the end of last year on the Right to Buy (RTB), the sale of the social housing.

It was commissioned by Housing Affairs Select Committee and was written by a team led by Professor Ian Cole of Sheffield Hallam University.

This report reviewed all the published material on social housing and is a treasure trove of information. It mentions the total receipts governments have earned under the RTB from 1980 to 2011 were £45 billion. The source for this information is the Rowntree Foundation and the government’s own figures The report’s author has also stated “some of these capital receipts were reinvested in housing but the majority were not”. The report also says that over the same period of time 1.8 million homes were sold under this RTB. How can anyone not be surprised when these numbers of houses are taken out from the system and the monies generated not reinvested that we have a housing crisis. Bluntly, I am looking forward to any suggestion that governments over the last 30 years are not responsible for this mess.

The report also looks into other published material of these sales, most of the properties have returned to the private rental market. The poor state of repairs and the quality of the homes are the major reason for the large number of sales, the discounts offered to buyers.

Against this background there has been a series of reports and suggestions on how to deal with this problem. One by Keith House and now Lady Elphick suggests councils should take a lead in housing delivery through community leadership, galvanising and securing local support for housing and making a case for housing growth as well as community action skills, construction skills and support for small builders. The most important question is where will the money come from required for all this? It is suggested that merchant banks should get involved. The think tank Civitas is slightly nearer the mark when it suggested the government should invest £20 billion to solve this problem. The simple answer is to put the money taken out of the system back. Of course, there is no hope of this the money taken out of the system going to the housing sector, it has all gone.

Architects have added their ideas on how to solve the housing crisis. One in Oxford suggests building houses on pillars, above car parks. The latest Housing Bill suggests further sales under the RTB and possibly the funding generated by this could be used to support the sale of electric cars. to prevent the pollution from present petroleum based cars. How will this solve the problem of the lack of housing?

In the last spending review the government have shifted the affordable homes programme from homes to rent to homes for sale. They are putting up £2.3 billion towards this and when one looks at the prices of housing in London, on average £450,000 against the rest of the country £225,000, how many people can afford mortgages on these sums of money? I think the words 'insult to injury' sum up the present situation.

In Wiltshire the number of affordable homes built last year was an all-time low, 412. The previous year it was 635 and in 2013-14 there were 2,231 affordable homes built. This against a waiting list of 20,000.

In this situation there are many losers, however, there are winners. The Sun newspaper recently quoted two members of UKIP who were complaining “about the huge six figure and totally unacceptable salaries the chief executives of the social housing providers now earn”.

E Manasseh, Loxley Close, Melksham