Dispatches from the housing crisis frontline

Rev Paul Nicolson (Letters, 17 April) is quite right to identify parliamentary landlordism as a contributory factor in the growing housing crisis, but I fear the problem may be worse than he suggests.As local authorities struggle to meet their new homelessness prevention and relief duties without any corresponding increase in social housing or any reversal of the government’s welfare reform programme, it is perhaps inevitable that councils would turn to private landlords for their help, bu