I'VE given a lot of thought to whether or not I should respond to Cllr Preest's ill-informed, inflammatory and insulting comment about Two Rivers Housing in last week's paper. After all, it was only a single, outrageous sentence in the middle of an otherwise fair and balanced story so perhaps I should ignore it and let your readers make up their own minds?

Then I decided that I would be doing a grave disservice to the organisation I represent and the people it serves if I were to let it pass by without challenge.

To my knowledge, Cllr Preest has never made any attempt to speak with us and his lack of understanding is apparent in his ignorant reaction to a story he knows nothing about. As an elected representative of his community I would have expected a more mature and considered response – or at least a phone call to find out the background before he made such an unwarranted accusation.

We are the biggest provider of affordable homes in the Forest of Dean, serving 3,800 people, and we invest in their properties and their wider communities too. Clearly he hasn't noticed the 500 high-quality, new houses we have built over the last 10 years or the £50 million we have invested in upgrading existing homes, or the well over £500,000 that we have ploughed into community initiatives, the most recent being the cafe and wildlife walk at Blakeney.

We are a registered charity and I am surprised and disappointed that he doesn't realise what this means. Our trustees are volunteers (I am one of them) and there are no shareholders to profit from our success.

Our housebuilding, home improvement programme and community investments are financed from debt funding. The interest and repayments are paid for out of the rents of our tenants. These rents are some of the lowest in the country and well below those charged by private landlords.

So I would say that we actually score pretty highly on moral code and we cannot be accused of being "cash-driven". We are externally scrutinised by the Homes and Communities Agency and they demand we manage our finances in an open and responsible way. This helps to ensure we remain in business to continue to serve future generations.

None of this means we are beyond criticism but it is important that a hard-working charity is judged fairly and treated in an even-handed way.

If Cllr Preest would like to look closely at our work then I would be more than happy to meet him and show him, first-hand, some of the fantastic results we have achieved in the last 10 years of investing in social housing and the wider local community.

– Dr David Garett, Chair.