Landlords 'deliberately running down estates

Housing associations and councils are being accused of deliberately blighting inner city areas in Liverpool to secure development sites on the cheap, it emerged today.

In written evidence to an inquiry by MPs into low demand for housing, the Merseyside Civic Society said the actions of housing associations and councils in the city were hastening the abandonment of historic terraced areas and leading to unnecessary demolition.

The claim is firmly denied by the government-backed "pathfinder" project in charge of tackling low demand housing in Merseyside.

The contested accusation is contained in a response by Peter Brown, chairman of the society and a senior lecturer in civic design at the University of Liverpool, to an inquiry by the select committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

He said: "The whole enterprise smacks of a conspiracy between the housing associations and local authority to 'carve up' the local property market between themselves."

Dr Brown explained that the failure of social landlords to invest in their own properties in some areas of Liverpool resulted in these properties falling empty and getting boarded, "thus reinforcing the impression of decline".

Home owners in such blighted areas were then offered the chance to sell up to councils or housing associations at depressed prices, he alleged.

Dr Brown claimed that such activity was being done under the government's Housing Market Renewal programme for tackling unwanted housing in the midlands and the north.

New Heartlands, the body awarded funds under the programme to tackle Merseyside's declining housing market, said there was no evidence for Dr Brown's allegations.

In a statement its managing director, Pauline Davis, said: "The New Heartlands proposals are based on firm evidence of longstanding housing market failure. We are not aware of any evidence to suggest that local authorities or housing associations have deliberately set out to blight any area within the pathfinder.

"On the contrary, they have been proactive in working with local communities to develop solutions that respond to the needs of residents providing better quality and more choice to create neighbourhoods for the future."

Dr Brown called for large scale refurbishment of terraced property and attacked the quality of homes being built to replace it. "These [terraced] properties, which in other parts of the city are much sought-after, are condemned to seemingly mindless clearance and replacement by mundane and unimaginative new-build development."

His evidence is an example of the growing unease about the scale of the demolition involved under the Housing Market Renewal scheme.

The committee has received a number of angry submissions from community groups protesting at the proposed destruction of their homes. Heritage groups including the Council for British Archaelogy, the Ancient Monument Society, and English Heritage have also expressed alarm at the plans.

But those in charge of the areas allocated funds are unrepentant. A joint response by those chairing the Housing Market Renewal pathfinders said: "Clearance rates will have to increase if we are to produce the modern housing stock which both the north and Midlands require without the associated problems of surplus housing and abandonment."