RESIDENTS battling to keep bulldozers out of a North-East neighbourhood are teaming up with anti-demolition campaigners elsewhere in the country.

People fighting proposals to pull down 1,500 homes in central Middlesbrough are to discuss tactics with residents resisting plans for massive demolition in Liverpool.

Campaigners from the North-West are travelling to Teesside to speak to residents of Middlesbrough's Gresham ward next week.

Middlesbrough residents are hoping that their Liverpudlian counterparts will help give them tips on taking their campaign to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

Mr Prescott and Prime Minister Tony Blair have been invited to visit the Gresham neighbourhood where 200 residents have signed pledges, not to sell their homes to Middlesbrough Council.

Residents are also calling on the council to hold "an urgent independent and public inquiry into the major inconsistencies in the council's procedures".

They say that particular and careful attention be given to the "very serious lack of consultation" - a principal reason why the scheme must not be given Government funding.

Residents are also urging Middlesbrough Council conducts a door-to-door survey to give everyone who lives in the community an opportunity to have a say on proposed regeneration plans.

Complaints have already been lodged with the Standards Board, the Government ethics agency, over the presence of three councillors - all directors of the Erimus housing organisation - at the decision-making meeting of the council's executive on July 20. Two of Erimus board members, who are members of the executive, voted for demolition of 37 streets.

A complaint has also been made to the board about Middlesbrough Mayor Ray Mallon's choice of language at a council meeting when he likened the proposed demolition of 1,500 houses to a surgeon cutting out a cancer.

Majahid Aslam, one of the residents' leaders, said: "We don't think what consultation there was has been transparent, and the demolition was decided less than a week later, without giving us the chance to come up with objections. There have been some serious errors made."

Mayor Mallon said without regeneration, entailing demolition and the building of new house styles more attractive to house buyers, Middlesbrough would become a ghost town.