A FURIOUS row broke out yesterday over a claim that the Government has failed to revive the North-East’s former mining communities – despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds.

A strategy designed to direct new investment and jobs into devastated pit villages “lacks a clear vision and has no overarching strategy”, the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned.

Its report concluded it was impossible to measure what improvement the cash had made to people’s lives and demanded a rethink before a further £450m is spent.

Last night, ministers hit back, accusing the committee – chaired by maverick Conservative backbencher Edward Leigh – of failing to look hard enough for evidence of success.

Ian Austin, the regeneration minister, said an earlier study by the National Audit Office (NAO) had concluded the programme had “transformed”

many coalfield areas.

He added: “Twenty-five years ago, entire communities were devastated by the coal industry’s collapse. Now whole communities have been revived, with almost 150,000 former miners getting new jobs or retraining.

“The equivalent of 4,500 football pitches of some of the most contaminated and derelict land in Europe has been brought back into use.”

The NAO report, in December, concluded that the regeneration programme – launched in 1997 to find new uses for 107 coalfield sites – had “achieved positive results in job generation”, but criticised the pace of progress.

It included detail on local improvements, including grants to about 900 community projects in the former Northumberland and Durham coalfields, and £27.8m being spent on the reclamation of Lambton Cokeworks, near Chester-le- Street.

Today’s report makes no specific reference to any spending in the North-East, concentrating on the question of whether the programme achieved “value for money”.

It also said, without further explanation: “The widespread pit closures began in 1981, but the Government did not establish the Coalfields Task Force until 1997.

“During this time, many people of working age in the coalfield communities withdrew from the labour market and moved onto incapacity benefits.”

The PAC said 193,000 coal jobs were lost because of the closure of 124 pits since 1981, resulting in “severe economic, social and environmental deprivation in many communities”.

By last summer, £630m had been spent on bringing 54 former coalfield sites back into working use, allowing the building of 2,700 private homes and 1.1million square metres of employment space.

But, despite the initiatives, 37 per cent of coalfield areas continued to be ranked amongst the most deprived in England, in 2007.

Mr Leigh said: “Taxpayers will want to know how the department could spend many hundreds of millions of pounds without having sophisticated measures of the direct effects of that expenditure.”