Prince Charles’s concern and detailed knowledge on the issue of affordable rural housing come through clearly in two letters to housing ministers in 2007 and 2008. In the first, to Yvette Cooper, he tells her he “appreciates more than I can say” that his Foundation for the Built Environment was going to be able to contribute to Labour’s ill-fated eco-towns project. The Prince says new developments should be “sympathetically” - i.e. conservatively - designed and that allowing 15 homes or more in one development can “completely undermine the character of the village”.

The 2008 letter, to Cooper’s successor as housing minister, Caroline Flint, continues the theme. Prince Charles is delighted that Flint may be able to to visit Poundbury, the new estate of traditional and neo-classical homes built on the Prince’s land near Dorchester. He also offers his charities’s help to Flint in her own constituency of Doncaster. Flint does not take up the offer in her reply. She also gently rebuffs suggestions from the Prince on how the government might better use its funding linked to rural housing.

Prince Charles becomes passionate about the loss of listed historic buildings to dereliction “at the hands of careless private owners”. He wrote: “The terrible loss of value represented by decaying buildings such as Denbigh Hospital in Wales and Torr Vale Mill in Derbyshire, for instance, makes me weep!” Flint says she will look into how to help local authorities to use their powers to force building repairs, but Denbigh Hospital remains in ruins as does Torr Vale Mill. A curious final paragraph in Charles’s letter says: “It would be wonderful, as we discussed, if we could establish an exchange of secondees” between the government department and the Prince’s charities.

Overall, as with his previously released letters on farming, the Prince comes over as knowledgable and, on some issues, prescient. The availability of affordable housing remains as much an issue today as it was seven years ago.