SIR – I refer to Councillor [Neil] Laurenson’s letter ’We are in crisis, but it’s not immigration’ (Worcester News, August 21).

He writes: “...only 11 per cent of new migrants have been allocated social housing, compared to 17 per cent of UK-born residents in this sector”.

Your statistics don’t add up, Mr Laurenson. Where’s the missing 72 per cent of this data? The figures I used were the Government’s.

I am frankly not interested in what Keith Taylor, Green Party MEP, has to say on the subject of immigration or indeed his comment that “...enough houses aren’t being built”.

As far as I am concerned, the Greens live in ‘fairy land’.

Mr Laurenson says in his letter, “...wages are stagnating (and) benefits are being cut”.

He might reflect that if we weren’t employing millions of foreigners in our economy we wouldn’t have over two million claiming unemployment benefit at an annual cost of £85 billion.

And if we had far fewer unemployed, wages would go up and benefits wouldn’t be necessary.

Employees, Mr Laurenson, are like every other commodity. If they are in short supply its price goes up, which means the surfeit of (foreign) labour available to employers is actually driving wage levels down.

Even the Greens are not immune from the laws of supply and demand, Mr Laurenson.

As with regard to building more houses, Worcester’s 30,000 new houses are going to concrete over about threeand-a-half square miles of farmland.

Who covers our farmland with concrete when our MPs already know we face future food shortages?

If you are ‘green’, Mr Laurenson, then you should be looking at what is sustainable.

Another 30,000 new houses and 80,000 new people in our city aren’t.

N TAYLOR

Worcester