I RETIRED and moved to Malvern 12 years ago.

For over 40 years I had worked in the provision of social housing, frequently frustrated by the fact that in that time the UK never built enough homes, resulting in the predictable current problems of shortage, high prices and rents, poor conditions and homelessness.

Living in Malvern is great — lots of people must envy us.

But the fly in the ointment is that some Malvern residents apparently want to deny that benefit to others not so fortunate.

It dismays me that your columns are regularly filled with accounts of how proposed housing developments are rejected by local councillors, particularly when they go against the advice of their professional planners.

Sometimes the reasons advanced by local campaigners seem to me fatuous, like the one that a development will ‘spoil the view from the hills’.

If that idea had been implemented in the past, many pleasant homes like mine, developed on the edge of town in the 1970s, would never have been built.

The new government has now recognised, unlike the previous one, that pandering to nimbyism is not a tenable housing policy.

But for some Malvern people it seems that the mindset that persists is ‘pull up the drawbridge, I’m all right Jack’.

Steve Smart

Malvern