A LEADING academic has attacked Tory plans to radically shake-up decision-making in the region, warning it would send poorer areas “to the wall”.

Professor Alan Townsend, formerly chairman of regeneration at Durham University, said proposals to axe regional bodies – and hand power to town halls – would lead to “Balkanisation”.

Local councils are too small to take key decisions over planning, housing and infrastructure, and would run into growing opposition from local people to almost any development, he warned.

A “law of the jungle”

would result, where weaker areas – Prof Townsend picked out Redcar and Cleveland – would lack all influence and would be “pushed to the wall”.

The fierce criticisms follow Tory pledges to scrap regional development agencies (RDAs) and create council-led “local enterprise boards”, charged with winning investment and jobs.

Under the party’s “localism”

agenda, regional spatial strategies (RSSs) – through which unelected regional assemblies decide 15 to 20-year housing, development and transport strategies – would also disappear.

The Conservatives insist the changes will bring decision-making under “proper democratic control”, arguing that RDAs and other quangos are answerable to no one.

But Prof Townsend has written to senior Conservatives to alert them to “mounting concern”.

He also warned Caroline Spelman (communities) and Theresa Villiers (transport) that their plans for a high-speed rail line would bite the dust if councils held the whip hand.

Prof Townsend wrote: “Regional machinery has made good strides on implementation and co-ordination of infrastructure between warring London departments.”

The academic said the change would not be “completely devastating”

in the North-East, because local councils had pledged to continue working together.

But he added: “When extended over the whole of England, it would allow wealthy areas to block the country’s housing needs – and push weaker areas like, say, Redcar and Cleveland, to the wall.”

Ms Spelman has insisted that local councils where an RDA is popular – such as the North-East – could agree to work together to carry out some of its functions.

But the 1998 Act that created the bodies would be repealed and its funding streams would be at the “discretion” of government departments.