Avril Malins (The Argus, July 9) poses some interesting questions about affordable housing, which is a required 40 per cent of housing development of ten units and over.

This is often referred to as housing for "key workers" - another concept in need of clarification.

Who selects the key workers?

If a key worker is allocated affordable housing and subsequently achieves promotion into a salary bracket in which he or she could afford housing in the open market, would he or she be required to vacate the accommodation for others lower down the pay scale?

As affordable housing needs subsidy, who pays for that? The developer, the employer or the taxpayer?

Nurses, police and teachers are usually quoted as key workers but why do we not hear about others, such as refuse collectors and street cleaners - essential workers who are perhaps on lower salaries than other key workers?

Are the groups quoted selected in the snobbish belief they will help to "sell" the demolition of good family houses that, regrettably, forms the basis of many planning applications?

And what happens to people on the council's housing list who do not qualify as key workers?

Whatever the answers, the need to provide sufficient lower cost accommodation of all types and sizes can surely not be met through knocking down good family houses and replacing them with blocks of flats.

Quite apart from the impossibility of demand for lower-cost housing being met through such incremental, uncoordinated applications it is worrying that the 40 per cent affordable housing proposed is always flats.

What will happen, over time, to family life in houses for folk who are not big wage earners - places where mum can be in the kitchen while the children are in the garden at the same level, within easy reach if need be, especially for safety reasons?

Certainly, a flat would be better than being homeless but provision to meet a range of needs is rarely offered and the flats are usually limited in size.

A return to housing provided directly by housing associations and local authorities would allow for coordinated planning and the creation of those sustainable communities aimed at by John Prescott.

This may not be easily achievable - but bringing in piecemeal dollops of lower-income flats on the back of bigger proportions of unwanted luxury flats, secured by tearing down habitable houses, is not the way.

If that trend is allowed to continue it will result in the twin evils of destroying the differing features of areas and overburdening the city's infrastructure, not least because many luxury flat-owners are incomers or second-homers, swelling the population.

The council is laudably working to define (and, hopefully, protect) the characteristics of certain areas.

That project needs to be fast-tracked. Meanwhile, every stand taken by the council (with local plan backing) against speculators motivated only by profit, with no consideration for the damage done to the character of an area and the distress caused to affected neighbours, is to be welcomed.

-Dr Janie Thomas, Brighton