ROSSENDALE'S run down 'ghettoes' will be shown to Government Minister Lord Charlie Falconer when he tours the Valley to see housing problems for himself next month.

Lord Falconer, Minister for Housing in the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions, will visit Rossendale on October 19 at the invitation of Rossendale and Darwen MP Janet Anderson.

She said: "I am hoping to get recognition by Government of the very special housing problems faced in North East Lancashire, largely as a result of small, run down privately-owned terraced houses which have probably reached the end of their life.

"That combined with the number of voids in the council's own housing stock."

Mrs Anderson said at the moment there were two options. One was by compulsory purchase, then demolish houses and compensate owners.

The other was to provide grants, but, even with thousands of pounds spent on them, some properties would still not be worth the money spent on them.

She continued: "I am hoping Lord Falconer's visit will lead to some innovative solutions being proposed for these very real problems."

In a letter to the Minister, Mrs Anderson said: "Some houses in Bacup will sell for as little as £3,000 and the cost of bringing them up to an acceptable standard can be as much as ten times their current value.

"This means we have many empty properties in this sector, as we do indeed in the public sector, but it also means that private landlords increasingly rent their houses to those on housing benefit with no alternative option.

"This is producing small but significantly important pockets (in terms of social deprivation) of run down areas -- in short, ghettoes.

"In recent months, we have also seen more and more asylum-seekers being deposited in these areas, which has exacerbated the problems of social deprivation."

She also highlights the problem in Rossendale of a relatively high number of roads, bridges, walls and other structures which are unadopted and often in areas of private housing where property values have decreased.

Mrs Anderson said: "Because the ownership of these structures is unknown, the local council has no responsibility to improve or maintain them.

"They mostly stem from the industrial revolution, where small developments sprang up in a fairly uncontrolled way."

She said she was hoping to show Lord Falconer Hightown in Whitewell Bottom, where the Victorian wall supporting gardens and houses built on the hill recently had to be completely rebuilt at a cost to Rossendale Council of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

After visiting Rossendale he will also be taken to Darwen to see the problems in that area.