A NEW appeal has been made for urgent investment to ease Bolton's private sector housing crisis.

Bolton has 22,000 unfit private-owned homes and 5,000-6,000 of them are beyond repair and need knocking down.

Bolton South East MP Brian Iddon says properties are deteriorating in old cotton towns like Bolton faster than they are being repaired.

And he has called in the Commons for the Government to urgently invest the millions of pounds needed to resolve the problem.

Bolton Council has also lobbied for the cash - but so far to no avail.

Councillors have agreed a massive study of every private home in the borough to assess the true extent of the problems and what can be done, which will then be sent to Whitehall.

Areas with the worst problems are the town centre, Blackburn Road, Daubhill, Deane and Halliwell.

Speaking in parliament, Dr Iddon, who used to be Bolton Council's housing chief, said: "Places such as Bolton, Burnley, Salford and Liverpool should be given money now to clear the properties that are deemed by environmental health officers to be beyond repair.

"The last clearance schemes of any significance were declared in Bolton in the early 1980s."

He stressed that clearance should not be on the scale of the 1970s and early 80s, when Bolton was knocking down up to 1,000 properties at a time and destroying communities.

Dr Iddon is calling for a slow rolling programme so that communities can be kept together by rehousing people in the vicinity of their former homes.

Delegates from the North West Housing Forum, chaired by Executive member for Housing Noel Spencer, have also lobbied Whitehall on the issue.