I was pleased to see Ian Hunt’s reply to Alan Moore’s complaint about low rents for council housing (Letters, August 26).

I have family and friends in Brighton council housing who are also paying two or three times the rent claimed by Mr Moore.

However, Ian Hunt is misinformed when he claims that Brighton’s private rented sector is mainly used by its “transient professional middle class” who can “well afford” high rents.

Thousands of hard-working people in this city are forced into such accommodation because doing the kind of jobs that keep any city working dooms us to low pay.

Because it is virtually impossible to get affordable council housing, we have no choice but to pay a huge proportion of our income to a private landlord or, if we are “lucky”, to a building society.

I have worked in childcare in Brighton for more than 20 years and I see too many families needing two parents to work long hours just to pay housing costs. They will then be criticised for not spending enough time with their children, even though they would love to.

If Brighton and Hove, in fact all of Sussex, had more genuinely affordable council housing, much of this area’s housing crisis could have been avoided.

Low-paid workers given a real choice to rent a secure home from the council would undercut the competition from private landlords and prevent them driving up rents to today’s astronomical levels.

“Buy to let” would then be a less attractive option for those who have taken advantage of the tax-back subsidy by the taxpayer. So house prices wouldn’t have been driven up in such a destructive way.

Mr Moore thinks “market rents” is the way forward for council rents. But it seems to me that the market,with its “law of supply and demand”, has totally failed when it comes to housing people across Britain and the US.

Now we can all see the disastrous results for the whole world.

But it is not too late. Our leaders need to put two and two together. Stop paying the dole to the 250,000 unemployed builders in this country and pay them to build desperately needed, affordable, zero-carbon homes. It seems obvious to me.

Dave Jones
Springfield Road, Brighton