As is so evident from his writings (‘Rental value’, August 11), Nicky Bianchi, too, can now be placed in the ranks of those property owners who, judging by their reactions, have long vacant and unutilised property who simply continue to insist that they allow their, again, long vacant and unutilised property, to continue to go to the dogs on (a) the ‘altar’ of ‘private property’ and (b) the hope that either the government (us taxpayers) bails them out by doing whatever needs to be done to get their property useful in a property mainstream sense or waiting for the eventual property developer, or ‘investor’, who will take it off them at a killing price.

It is simply puerile to talk of “rental values” and “market values” in such a context. And any implication that I am advocating a return to rent controls – even though they would not be such a bad thing if viewed from the standpoint of so many families who are being fleeced alive at this moment – is equally puerile. Indeed, if rents are, by law, made to relate to workers’ incomes, would that be such a bad thing from a sociological viewpoint?

Bianchi mentions European Court of Justice decisions. If he reads these carefully he will see that they strive to strike a just social balance between both owners and tenants.

What’s wrong with a national policy that relates all social housing rents to families’ incomes? It is surely Christian and not at all capitalist.

It is really quite revealing of the sense of humane justice that pervades sectors of our society to watch the reactions of those who persist in their absolutist capitalist stances of insisting that (a) national assets continue to go to waste and (b) nobody interferes with the present rental jungle anytime.