B C VAUGHAN of Victoria Road, Dartmouth, writes:

So far as I can determine, Sarah Wollaston's current tendency to swing round blame on the second home owners for lack of 'homes' for this up and coming Generation is:

a) too easy to assume,

b) defectively diversionary,

c) impoverished of wisdom,

d) blinkered to multi-causes and as usual,

e) infected with the national institutionalised contempt for our young. She is far from alone.

To formulate a remedy for this massive crisis of homelessness it is firstly necessary to rid the problem of its ramparts of false and incorrect expressions.

The heading: 'second home' is incorrect. It should be realised that they are not buying a 'home' – but a property. It is being secured for a number of reasons; some of them quite legitimate, including for the future security of grand-children. Further, in all dialogue about housing, any property or building cannot be 'entitled as a Home' until a happy, loving family is installed and living there; until then it is just 'accommodation'.

It is all part of the deceitful salesman patter, which uses syrupy, comfy wording to divert worries from the huge capital cost of owning and financing your own dwelling. It is not a cute, cosy 'home' therefore, but simply a house or property.

The next errant word is: 'affordable!'. Such a comfy cosy word, but it cloaks the harsh and impossible situation that an industrial built house is never able to be afforded by a young couple. For two decades, pure tumbling and blind greed have been raising the price of an address for a couple.

The price is monstrously disproportionate to the real value of all the building materials when purchased at a local store, and completely swamped with all the effects of bureaucratic, avaricious stoke barrage of regulations - licences - grants - permissions - inspections and strange liabilities, all hooking themselves on to a new building plot as leeches.

None of them actively contributing towards producing a finished house whatsoever. Everybody has their grasping hands dug deeply into this gravely misused 'milch cow' of industrialised house building, from government agents; landowner to local council and planning; contractors to estate agents and solicitors.

These are the real culprits 'sucking the life out of our communities' – but who are the ones who will finally be getting the massive bill for all these parasite-like steady binges into the housing account? Our Young!

Too bad they won't have the cash to pay it.

Nobody cares – they are not able to save for a mortgage – even if they could, they would not get one for their wages are far too low.

They can't afford to rent, for rent prices are close to mortgage repayments, and now, typical of the spiteful English, even squatting is criminalised to act as a roof over one's head. Even if the young are given parental help with a first mortgage payment, they face a whole lifetime of austerity, paying the interest or more off the loan – entrapped in a fiscal treadmill for life, just to keep a roof over their heads.

It is a bizarre nightmare comparable to any cheap science fiction paperback novel.