MR WARNE (Letters, May 2) says we should establish the 'requirement', that we don't know what 'affordable' means and that a bungalow at £210,000 is not 'affordable'.

My shelf groans under the two-volume report of the independent consultants who established the first two; the third I and my Park colleagues were able to work out for ourselves.

Miss Steers then castigates us for having 'allowed' too many houses to be built. Planning permissions are given within the law and not always by the Park. As Miss Steers should know, since the one permission given in the village in which we both live was refused by the Park, and given by a Government inspector!

The population figures for the Park show that while we have the same numbers of children and older people as Devon as a whole, we have 1,000 fewer aged 16-29 than we should have. This reflects local young people, unable to get onto the property ladder at open market prices. No, they cannot hope to buy the established properties for which the incomers will always outbid them, but it is possible to build a decent starter home, discounted to a price which some of our more determined young can manage.

Ironically, the new policies are designed to achieve precisely the overall reduction in new building which your correspondents appear to want, while offering limited and belated amends to local people for decades of devastation of their communities and destruction of their families.

Sad, when the Park has, after decades of struggle, finally accepted that the local humans are also part of the eco-system and need their habitat protected, that local people seem unable to welcome their conversion.

Cllr Nicholas Waterhouse

Member, Dartmoor National Park Authority and West Devon Borough Council

I COULD not agree more with the comments made by Mark Warne regarding 'affordable housing' and especially how the average income of £24,000 is calculated.

In last week's paper you reported on the residents of Bere Alston still unhappy about any new development. Unfortunately, I was not at the council meeting myself but would be quite interested as to how many of these objectors are relatively newcomers, perhaps having come to the village to retire.

Those of us who were born in Bere Alston and have brought up our own families are now finding that our children are being forced to live elsewhere, having been priced out of the local housing market. On scanning the property pages the cheapest house is an ex-council property at almost £84,000 - what chance do our children have?

I would be glad to hear from anyone else who like myself supports any development where properties will be made available and affordable to the truly local first-time buyer.

Pauline Jolliffe

Wedge-Wood

Bere Alston