JOHN PRESCOTT has spent £168 million on private consultants to advise on the demolition of 168,000 Victorian houses in the North despite growing criticism of the scheme.

A report by SAVE Britain’s Heritage, published today, strongly condemns the Deputy Prime Minister’s programme of bulldozing hundreds of terraces by 2016 and calls for an immediate halt to further demolitions.

The heritage campaigners claim that houses with historical significance are being knocked down after cursory inspections, with little or no public consultation. It would be much cheaper to renovate and adapt the existing buildings, they argue.

“Mr Prescott is mounting an all-out attack on one of the classic forms of the English house,” a SAVE spokesman said. “It is a tragedy and outrage that Mr Prescott’s department is bent on repeating the mistakes of the past, creating so much misery and anxiety in the process.”

In some areas the terraces are making way for a mixture of private and social housing that will be too expensive for local residents, the charity says. But many of the houses, which have been empty for years and are in areas of low demand, will not be replaced.

According to the report, the main beneficiaries are the private developers and consultants who have been hired to advise on planning and sites for Mr Prescott’s nine Pathfinder schemes for regeneration.

The SAVE spokesman said: “The real winners here will be the house builders, who stand to gain from the compulsory purchase of people’s homes at artificially low prices and redevelopment of more expensive housing, often out of reach of the displaced residents. Also cashing in on the bonanza are the consultants on whom to date £168 million has been spent — enough to restore 8,000 terraced houses.”

The report also argues that regeneration plans for several of the areas where housing has been demolished are lacking in realistic vision. “Vision, not Stalinist bureaucracy, is the tonic required,” it says.

Adam Wilkinson, SAVE’s secretary, said that the lessons of the previous clearance in the 1960s appeared not to have been learnt. “A more delicate approach is needed to these areas, based on proper area management, small-scale interventions and improving market conditions, not the clumsy tool of demolition, which should only ever be a last resource.”

There is growing concern from architects and planners about Mr Prescott’s programme. Two months ago the Urban Taskforce, chaired by the leading architect Lord Rogers of Riverside, attacked the demolition of terraces and said that the regeneration schemes were “clumsy and wasteful”.

A spokesman for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said: “This report is utter nonsense. SAVE clearly are only interested in ill-informed scaremongering, not the facts. Nor are they interested in helping the community who have been blighted by low demand and boarded up homes — people who support their local Pathfinder programme.

“The figures on demolition bear no relationship to reality. In practice, Pathfinder programmes are taking a wide range of action to turn around neighbourhoods blighted by boarded-up houses, vandalism and antisocial behaviour. To date over 13,000 have been refurbished, compared with 4,000 demolished.”

DEMOLITION PATH

The nine areas covering 850,000 homes are: Birmingham and Sandwell; North Staffordshire (Stoke-on-Trent/Newcastle under Lyme); Merseyside (Liverpool, Sefton, Wirral); Manchester and Salford; East Lancashire (Blackburn, Hyndburn, Burnley, Pendle. Rossendale); Newcastle and Gateshead; Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire; Oldham and Rochdale; South Yorkshire (Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster)

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers