• DOCTOR Jane Roberts (Letters, December 15) makes a very important point about the threat to maternity services at the Royal Free Hospital when she mentions, among reasons for considering closure, a declining birth rate in Camden and difficulties in recruitment of skilled staff.

This illustrates the common cause of many critical problems in inner London, namely the explosion in house prices and rents, together with the attrition of social housing.

Ordinary people can’t afford family homes and even highly-qualified professional staff can’t afford to live a reasonable distance from the hospital. The same basic problem is the cause of the loss of so many schools, as people who send their children to state schools can’t afford to live here any more.

We need a government that will prioritise saving London from the housing price disaster.
Obviously dramatic investment in new social housing (and in refurbishing existing stock) must be basic, but there can be no solution as long as capital flows freely into the top end of the market.

The super-rich investing in property prices the merely rich out of their traditionally posh districts and into, well, Camden, for example.

We need a commitment to stopping and reversing this influx of capital, by some combination of rules and tax policies that will not only raise the capital to revitalise social housing but make London unattractive to the super-rich.

I fear this is unlikely to be on offer at the next election, but maybe change will begin.

JOHN WILSON
Address supplied