I WAS fortunate to retire to live here last summer having lived previously in the Bristol and London areas for 40 plus years.

Those years were spent working in the provision of housing of various types.

In this week’s Gazette I found not one but three reports of local residents and their parish councils resisting new housing development proposals.

Am I alone in finding this deeply depressing ?

The national housing shortage is now by far the biggest and most persistent since Bevan, and then Macmillan, tackled the post- war housing shortage in the 40’s and 50s.

Politicians of all parties acknowledge that we must now address this current national shortage.

Millions of young families who are working hard in good jobs (including my own daughter and her partner) are locked out of owner-occupation, and forced to live in expensive poor-quality privaterented housing.

The shortage is what is keeping house prices and rents high, despite the recent economic slump.

Not every proposal can be wrong.

If we had had the same resistance in bygone decades how many of their pleasant homes would have been built ?

STEVE SMART

Malvern