City councillor Claire Palmer has bravely admitted to her financial predicament, illustrating the problems so many people face (Oxford Mail, March 2).
She makes a telling point about how much easier it is for the well-off to be councillors.
That is not how it should be. We need councillors and MPs with their own experience of such tough day-to-day pressures.
Many other people now work freelance, like Ms Palmer, with all the uncertainty and lack of back-up that implies. I do, too, and I know both the rough and the smooth of it.
But when work is so concentrated in the South East, it creates further pressures.
We face the absurd situation where hundreds of thousands of new homes are built on scarce, flood-prone land here, while in the north "surplus" homes are being demolished.
Jobs should once again be stimulated where the people are, not people moved to them.
In Oxford, huge mortgages or exorbitant rents are required for little living space.
Ms Palmer and other Green councillors do all they can to get homes provided for people with limited means. But the Government insists on market rents for social housing and sales of council houses to the private sector.
Council tax is often the last straw. It should be replaced by a land value tax and other measures to spread the load more fairly and reduce the boom-and-bust cycle in house prices.
The Government should be taking such pressures off people's backs, not piling them on.
TOM LINES
Prospective Green
Parliamentary Candidate
Oxford West and Abingdon
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