The letter from Councillor Alan Lay, in which he describes a “nightmare” situation arising from the need to build a city the size of Peterborough to cope with the levels of immigration, is misleading to say the least.

His description of people, sharing bedrooms and stuffed into loft conversions, paints a picture in which we see arms and legs sticking out of windows and air vents.

He also suggests that the Government’s proposal to build affordable housing will pass planning permission without including the need for roads, sewage, schools, hospitals etc.

The 260,000 people that are coming to England to work are not going to settle, en bloc, in one area; the amount of people arriving amounts to 2.7 people per square mile.

At present there are 610,000 empty properties in the country (Gov.uk statistics) and no doubt some of these are within the Wisbech area, so it might be incumbent of Cllr Lay to investigate this before deciding to build another Peterborough.

I would suggest that rather than putting his energies into scaremongering and dividing the population, he investigates the correlation between the infertility of three million couples who are classed as infertile (Gov.uk statistics) and the intense farming practices of large corporate food outlets and their use of pesticides.

He might consider that, with that amount of people in the country not being able to have children, the arrival of 260,000 workers is helping redress the balance of what would otherwise be a shrinking population.

STEVEN SMITH

Elizabeth Terrace

Wisbech

Via e-mail