GREG Pope today urged Ministers to hurry and authorise a £670million scheme aimed at tackling East Lancashire's problem of decaying, Victorian terraced housing.

The Hyndburn Labour MP made his Westminster plea for quick decisions by local government and housing secretary Stephen Byers and Chancellor Gordon Brown.

And he highlighted individual streets and constituents who were suffering because of their decaying homes.

One was Robert Treasure, from Steiner Street, Accrington, who "quite simply through no fault of his own lives in Victorian squalor," Mr Pope said.

Mr Treasure, 63, who is disabled, claimed he had been the target of an ongoing hate campaign and set up his own CCTV system three years ago in a bid to catch the teen thugs who, he said, taunted him and attacked his home.

He has a television camera trained on the footpath outside his front door in an attempt to catch offenders.

Mr Pope also described the plight of a pensioner in Pearl Street, who remembered when it was a good area to live in.

"Now it looks like a war zone with empty houses infested with rats," he said.

And he said Lonsdale Street faced similar problems of dereliction and vermin.

Mr Pope said: "I have got 9,000 unfit homes in Hyndburn. The position is replicated in Burnley, Pendle, Rossendale and Blackburn.

"When Housing Minister Lord Falconer visited in October he was shocked by what he saw and asked us to put together a 10-year plan.

"The East Lancashire Partnership formulated such a plan which will require £670million over 10 years. That plan is now somewhere between Mr Byers and the treasury. I urge the Minister to get it approved as quickly as possible so we can start work on sorting out this terrible problem which is a blight on East Lancashire and its people."

Mr Pope said that the low value of Victorian terraces in East Lancashire created a "cycle of despair" where people did not want to stay in their homes but could not sell them.

He said terraced homes which were worthless in Hyndburn could sell for £300,000 in parts of London and he said action was needed.

He said that it was widely accepted that poor housing was one of the contributory causes to the riots in Burnley and Bradford.

Housing Minister Sally Keeble said the government was committed to tackling housing problems in East Lancashire and elsewhere, especially the question of low value and derelict homes.

But she said difficult decisions about demolition, clearance and restrictions on new bills would be needed from the local authorities.