EAST Lancashire's lone Tory MP has condemned Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott for doing too little to protect the Green Belt.

The Ribble Valley MP is unhappy that the Government's U-turn on the issue will leave too many green field sites being concreted over.

Mr Prescott says that the percentage of houses that will be built on "urban brown field" reclaimed from dereliction will go up from 50 per cent to 60 per cent.

But Tory front-bencher Mr Evans said: "John Prescott is at last starting to understand the depth of feeling that countryside dwellers have on the issue of new housing in rural areas.

"But he has not gone far enough and his plans for a so-called 'green field tax' are deeply flawed.

"Ironically, they could mean more developments going ahead on virgin land because the Treasury would want to collect the money and developers would still be willing to pay.

"They should scrap this plan. Anything lower than a two-third target for building on brown field is totally unacceptable.

"John Prescott has recently admitted that 'our programme is about regenerating the cities.' I do not want to see this happening at the expense of the countryside.

"The Government needs to reconsider how it arrived at the figure of 4.4 million new houses it intends to build by 2016.

"This figure represents nine extra cities this side of Bristol literally covering our landscape.

"I want to see this figure re-evaluated independently and the vast majority of new houses built on derelict or under-developed inner city sites."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.