PEOPLE must change the way they live if the North- East is to tackle its “unacceptable” record of bad living and early death, a Government minister said.

Anne Milton, the public health minister, urged people to recognise they were responsible for their own choices in warding off heart disease and cancer.

She told MPs: “The major part of poor health in the area will be remedied only by widespread changes in behaviour.

It is this Government’s policy to encourage people to change how they live.

“We cannot frog-march people out of the off-licence, compel them to stop smoking or force them to practise safe sex. Our challenge is to make the case that freedom without responsibility is not sustainable.”

But Ms Milton faced opposition from Labour MPs, who warned that her Government was cutting funding for projects to tackle health inequalities between rich and poor areas.

Meanwhile, more than 40 directors of public health and more than 100 public health academics warned that the troubled Health and Social Care Bill would further widen that health gap.

Speaking afterwards, Pat Glass, Labour MP for North- West Durham, said: “The response from Anne Milton was inadequate and insulting to the North-East.”

The clash came during a Commons debate on bad health in the region, where the average person dies up to nine years earlier than in leafy Kensington and Chelsea, in central London.

Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, told MPs: “Every year, 37,000 people – enough to fill a modern football stadium – die in the North earlier than their counterparts in the South.

“A report, published in the British Medical Journal last year, said that ‘the excess toll of ill health and disability in the North was decimating the region at the rate of one major city every decade’.”

Ms Onwurah said Labour had been making progress on improving that dismal picture – but the Government had now sharply cut funding to local health trusts.

Ms Milton acknowledged improvements in the North- East under Labour, including 137,000 fewer smokers and NHS stop smoking services that helped more people than anywhere else in England.

But she added: “Maybe they would do better to reflect on their own record.”

Labour put in place a target to cut the huge life expectancy gap between rich and poor areas by ten per cent by 2010.

But, when the party left office, of 16 local authority areas with low life expectancies in the region, only two – Derwentside and Blyth Valley – were on course to hit the target.