Life isn’t all rosy in the inner cities, sadly | Letters

Slum clearance | Mortality rates in Newcastle | The common cold | Personal hygiene

Although I would not want to justify the government’s housing record, it should be remembered that between the 1950s and 1980s local authorities were demolishing thousands of slums each year, so the net increase in housing stock was nowhere near as great as implied by the graph that accompanied your article (Housing £2bn promise ‘just chicken feed’, 5 October).
Steve Shearsmith
Cottingham, East Yorkshire

• Deborah Orr (Opinion, 7 October) is right to praise inner cities, but there is another side for too many who live there. It takes me 12 minutes to drive from my home to the inner-city ward in Newcastle that I represent as a councillor. For each of those minutes life expectancy falls by a year. Until the inequalities that this dismal fact reflects are addressed there can be no room for complacency about the state of our cities.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords

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Continue reading... October 08, 2017 at 11:26PM