I have the misfortune to live in a Regency block on Hove seafront - great location, shame about Brighton and Hove City Council's conservation department.

The problem is the Grade I listing, which is designed to protect the buildings from being mercilessly redeveloped.

This sounds a good thing but the rules are so strict, the conservation department so unyeilding and the planning and conservation departments so wilfully unhelpful, that, in many cases, they are actually helping put many of these buildings into a state of disrepair.

Residents who wish to improve their homes cannot do so unless they observe the council's obsessive-compulsive interpretation of home improvement.

Many residents simply do up their Grade I listed homes without the council knowing because tangling with its conservation fetishists is too tortuous. Compromise would let it have more of a say.

-Tom de Kadt, Brunswick Square, Hove