Tim Simms asks me where I have been for the last decade (Sound of the suburbs', Times Letters, April 17).

I have been in Barnet watching thousands of dwellings being built and only nine percent of them affordable.

Twenty years ago I was one of the first people ever to be invited to speak in the chamber at Hendon Town Hall, when leading the fight to decant and demolish the Springwood estate in Edgware.

People were living like animals, with buckets all over the rooms to catch the rainwater coming through the ceilings, windows boarded up for safety and no sunlight coming in, the walls covered with black fungus and mould, children and pensioners with constant chest complaints.

I never lived on this estate but I cared, and when we sought help from the local Tory MP John Gorst, whose office was no further than a mile away, he did not even bother to visit.

The Tory council did nothing for years except increase the rent. Our efforts got this estate demolished, but did the council build new council homes? No, it sold the land to private developers, a loss to the authority housing portfolio of hundreds of homes that were desperately needed then as they are now.

For Mr Timms to suggest population growth is the responsibility of Government and Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is utter nonsense.

John Sullivan, Bushfield Crescent, Edgware