Polly Toynbee (House building alone won't end this ladder of insanity, 4 April) is right to turn her fire on the chaotic UK housing market. The absence of definition of affordable housing is the black hole at the heart of every policy to reduce poverty. That failure is destroying the viability of the living wage, and has already destroyed it for the national minimum wage and unemployment benefits in metropolitan areas.

Poverty can only be increased while central government allows the market to extract larger and larger amounts of rent and council tax, by threats of eviction and prison, out of the incomes needed for food, water, fuel, transport, clothes for growing children and other necessities. The poorest tenants in rent arrears will continue to be pushed from pillar to post by demented free market extremists in Westminster.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in May 2013 that in 2012-13 Haringey had accepted 1,833 households from other London boroughs, 1,200 from Islington, and exported 1,282 out of the borough, 1,147 to Enfield. A total of 19,057 households had moved between boroughs in London. That included the impact of the coalition's housing allowance caps on housing benefit in 2012-13; since April 2013, the bedroom tax, the £500 overall benefit cap and the council tax have been wreaking additional havoc. This is like pouring households into a giant kitchen mixer and expecting them not to get hurt.

Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

• Polly Toynbee rightly identifies the house price explosion as a social disaster, but she misses some of its ramifications. She writes that over-60s "see how their children and grandchildren struggle to find anywhere to live". If over-60s own the house they live in, they might think that their children will at least be able to live in it after them. But this is not the case, in London at any rate: the house-price explosion will have brought the most modest home into the inheritance tax bracket, and the children will have to sell it and be left with too little to buy anything in London.

Anyone who bought a modest home years ago at a reasonable price would be hit by Toynbee's proposed 1% property tax; 1% of their home's supposed current market value could be half their current income, forcing them to sell up and move out. Toynbee and others have pointed out that "social cleansing" of poor tenants is in progress in London. Her proposed property tax would amount to social cleansing of owner-occupiers on modest incomes.

It's generally understood that current house prices hurt the majority of non-owners; it needs to be understood that high market values don't help the majority of owners who just want to live in their houses, and can hurt some of them very badly.

John Wilson

London

• As well as the cheap money policies of the Bank of England and state subsidisation of mortgages that Polly Toynbee mentions, restrictive planning laws imposed by the state (including the Green Belt) mean supply is severely unresponsive to new demand in areas where people want to live. The degree of state interference can be seen most clearly in statistics which suggest land values increase up to 250-fold in the south-east when planning permission is granted. It's therefore baffling to claim housing an example of market failure. Our housing market is as clear example of government failure through misguided state policies as one could get.

Ryan Bourne

Head of public policy, Institute of Economic Affairs

• Anne Perkins is right about the council tax (Time to ditch the unfair council tax, 2 April). Not only is a revaluation of homes long overdue but the huge gains made by those in the most expensive homes – primarily in London – need to be reined in. Many of those homes are paying a fraction of the bills they had under the last year of domestic rates 25 years ago. It was not uncommon then for the most expensive homes in London to pay domestic rates of £10,000 a year; now, depending on which London borough they're in, they enjoy bills as low as £1,350 a year.

The crude council tax banding system needs replacing with individual valuations to produce a fairer distribution of the council tax burden. Help could be given for those who are asset-rich but income-poor.

When Northern Ireland scrapped the old rates system it opted for a council tax based on property values but, rather than creating a series of price bands, it opted for individual valuations. To prevent punishingly high bills for those in the most expensive homes, it set a ceiling so that no home would be considered to be worth more than £400,000.

Don't expect any rush, though, to reform the tax in the rest of the UK. For the foreseeable future, council tax reform remains a political no-go area.

John Andrew

Speldhurst, Kent

• John Harris ridicules as outdated left-of-Labour calls for a mass house-building programme to solve the housing crisis (The Tories own the future – the left is trapped in the past, Comment, 3 April). But a new report predicts that London will be "crippled" if there is no solution to housing disaster.

What would Harris offer to the private tenant whose landlord is demanding a rent increase on his one-bedroom flat in Walthamstow from £800 to £1,200?

This is what is old-fashioned, stuck in the pre-council-house past where landlords' greed was the only factor determining rents. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition calls for mass building of council homes, for trade union rates of pay in the jobs created in the building and refurbishment schemes, and for rent control, with rent councils to set the cap. To most people, that's a programme that addresses the future.

Sarah Sachs-Eldridge

London

• Given the lack of any coherent policies, the only option remaining to pro-Europe, left-thinking individuals would seem to be a cynical exploitation of the house-price bubble: sell up and move to somewhere warm with nice dinners and cheap wine before they bar the doors against us.

Duncan Grimmond

Harrogate

• I wonder how ministers, let alone the MPs on the standards committee, can be trusted to legislate to rebalance the economy away from property values.

Richard Harley

Alresford, Hampshire