BARRY VAUGHAN, of Townsend Close, West Alvington, writes: I felt downhearted at the Victorian-style picture of 'Sherford's new town'. This is similar to those others – one near Newquay – purporting also to be a 'new town', but towns do not grow overnight; never have. Any village, growing into a town, needs its raison d'être from the beginning. But these models of corporate, rapacious auspiciousness, smothering all by their slick ability to afford 24/7 professional back-up, are good at presenting the typical town model, complete with pretty trees and shrubs dotted artistically about, in among the builds for the planners, but are much more a showcase for their trade as developers and housebuilders. Not nation builders. What they always fail to reflect is the heart and soul of the estate or 'town', and the near countless other factors that towns have grown up with or introduced as required. There is no money-making employment in that area; but they will collect their cash for selling the houses – eventually. But society locally will have to pick up the bill for substantial numbers of families with no income. Most of the buildings look to be – as near Newquay – three-storey types, reminiscent of the Victorian workhouse model; most will be fire traps if flats, with the majority being severely restricted in space for future development, ie a new ­bedroom, workshop/garage or garden feature – if there is access to a garden at all – as land is laid out to be communal public land areas with signs to prevent children being children, and making sure there is no rough land left for more flats or urgent extensions. The trend today is for even LESS land, for back yards, to be allowed per plot. What scope is there for alternative living – ie living outside the consumer box instead of being chained to government-controlled utilities, where every avenue to heat your house is tied to huge mono-mega-energy companies – a 'long live the company' town? You live only to feed them. All these properties will be liable for council tax, an open-ended tax, as well as the open-ended VAT, a cursed tax that cannot be escaped by those on low incomes. But these heartless amalgams of industrial property are being welcomed by those very people in planning who snarled away at the village young when they wanted a few square feet on which to build a roof over their heads, and by their sour ­decisions enforced everyone else to live in unsuitable ­locations at some old, half-abandoned farm in those very farm buildings in which ­animals lived. None of those buildings had damp courses. It is both difficult and expensive to live in these 'converted barns'. But it is not more houses we want, but for the greedy to be separated from those who wish to make a primary purchase of a house of their own. I think it will be impossible – there are too many greedy pigs with their smelly hands scooping out huge profits for themselves and, in so doing, waving the flag for a housing 'market'. Any democratic power to bring it under control has long gone owing to the Local Government Act 2000. But the final account being picked up by this and the next generation just cannot be met. Nothing short of the Dutch ­system for housing will have to be adopted. All in all, housing in this country – rents, evictions etc – are both a national scandal of wholesale neglect, chronically nasty and decidedly a strategic threat to the stability of Britain. It is just so gormless – trying to 'earn' thousands of pounds out of those young ones just starting out in life: it just ­cripples that generation before they can grow up to contribute towards their country.