John Prescott has had a busy month. Ten days ago, at a symposium in a hotel near Accrington, his department reaffirmed its determination to flatten thousands of Victorian houses in northern England. On Monday Prescott announced changes to the planning system that would nullify local democracy and accelerate the building of 1.1m homes in London and the southeast. On Wednesday, against the opposition of his own advisers, he gave permission for the tallest block of flats in Europe to be built over shadowing Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.

Even by his own standards this has been a virtuoso performance of sustained insensitivity. As an arbiter of taste Prescott ranks alongside an East German municipal planner of the 1950s. As a guardian of the environment he has the discrimination of an earthquake. Not since the ill-starred slum clearances and march of the tower blocks in the 1960s have English towns and villages lived in such fear.

The north has had the worst of it. Prescott’s now notorious “Pathfinder” regeneration schemes threatened the demolition of 400,000 homes in working-class areas across the land from Liverpool to Newcastle.

In prospect it sounded like a new age of enlightenment: investment in run-down urban areas; new administrative networks; consultation with local people; replacement of unsafe or unwanted buildings; new infrastructure. All this, and more, was promised.

However, there was a snag. To earn their Pathfinder grants, local authorities would have to “deliver” demolition quotas. To meet Prescott’s aim of creating “sustainable communities”, people would have to have their homes knocked down. The more typically northern a street — terrace houses, corner shops, pubs — the more certainly it faced the wrecking ball.

Cash-hungry councils immediately issued compulsory purchase orders on grids of historic Victorian terraces. This blighted local markets and created the very conditions — rock-bottom property prices and zero demand — that were supposed to trigger the clearances in the first place. Owners were offered compensation at current market rates which, being depressed by the threat of demolition, gave them no hope of affording another house.

At Nelson in Lancashire it took two public inquiries and the concerted opposition of English Heritage, the Prince’s Foundation, Save Britain’s Heritage, the Victorian Society and others before Prescott backed off and local people felt secure in their homes again.

At nearby Darwen, owners of recently refurbished properties, some of them newly mortgaged with unblemished structural surveys, were informed that their homes were unfit for habitation. It made no difference that English Heritage, the government’s own official adviser, suggested that in general it was more cost- efficient to restore Victorian houses than to replace them; or that Brian Clancy, a past president of the Institution of Structural Engineers, examined in detail a sample of eight condemned Darwen houses and could find nothing wrong with them. One was “an ideal little first-time buyer house”; others were “an absolute palace” and “an absolutely wonderful property”.

PRESCOTT sustained the pretence that clearance was not compulsory. “I believe passionately in the value of our heritage and the need to preserve old buildings,” he said in November 2003. “In the past, regeneration has often meant wholesale demolition. But demolition is not an essential part of regeneration.” By way of example he praised a scheme in Salford, where the developer, Urban Splash, was “turning the inside of old terraced houses upside down to create attractive modern living spaces in a traditional Victorian house”.

In reality, all that will be kept of the 349 homes is their facades. Everything else — roofs, floors, party walls — is being ripped out. The reason? Knocking down and replacing a building is exempt from Vat but restoration is charged at 17.5%. Restorers therefore are forced to reduce perfectly good buildings to wrecks simply to upgrade the job and get it zero-rated.

In the case of Salford, the result was an increase in development costs of £1.4m and a significant hike in public funding. What greater idiocy could there be than a government spending money simply to avoid one of its own taxes? At the Accrington seminar, the Vat regulations were listed among a number of issues that “need to be considered in more depth”. It was also hinted that demolitions might be scaled down from 400,000 to something closer to 70,000 or 100,000 homes, although this is contradicted by the official strategy report, Moving Forward: the Northern Way. “Based on current rates over the next 10 years,” it says, “some 167,000 homes will be cleared. This is well below the rate required.”

In the shambles that surrounds the deputy prime minister, confusion and contradiction are classic indicators of business as usual.

AS the north of England confronts the bulldozer, so must the southeast face the concrete mixer. Last Monday Prescott’s office launched a consultation paper, Planning for Housing Provision, which followed a report by Kate Barker, the economist, proposing radical changes.

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