MORE and more, I find myself looking at the headline on top of a Government announcement – and then realising that exactly the opposite is the truth.

For example, the schools’ revolution – more academies and “free schools” – masks an extraordinary accumulation of power in Whitehall despite ministers’ claims to be handing it to parents.

Similarly, the Government insists it is giving the region more muscle and money to revive its economy. In truth, the cash is drying up and power is heading back to London.

However, nowhere is this Alice-in-Wonderland world more apparent than in housing, where the claim that it will soon become easier to build desperately-needed affordable homes is truly mind-boggling.

Last week, a “Right to Build” was promised with the aim of providing small numbers of cheaper homes where sky-high prices are driving locals away. We were told that residents would form housing trusts and bypass planning permission, ensuring they would not be “thwarted by bureaucracy”.

It sounded revolutionary – until I read that these pioneering residents would be required to hold a referendum and win the support of 80 to 90 per cent of local people to push ahead.

Now, it must be blindingly obvious to all that a plan to build more homes is far more likely to be defeated in a referendum than in a vote of the council. That’s why “Nimby” is such a famous acronym.

Surely, this plan is handing a veto to the noisy minority in every community – as well as requiring busy residents to rack up the time and expense of finding lawyers and accountants to help run a trust.

This week, the National Housing Federation warned that 500,000 people will be added to social housing waiting lists under an expected £3bn cut to budgets for affordable homes from next year.

Remember, there are already 107,000 families across the region on that waiting list because of Labour’s failure – for so many years – to build enough homes Remember, too, that the Government has already frozen 150 social housing projects after allegedly finding a £600m “black hole”

in Labour’s spending plans.

This is the depressing truth about Britain’s housing crisis – in the face of which any “Right to Build” a few more homes in villages would struggle to have significance.

Even worse than that, we have a device – the referendum – that appears deliberately designed to stop any homes being built at all.

HEALTH Minister Simon Burns has a rosy complexion at the best of times – but his face should be redder than my beloved Welsh rugby shirt over the Wynyard Park hospital fiasco.

The minister has given three different figures for alleged “savings” from axing the scheme and continuing to run ageing hospitals in Hartlepool and Stockton.

The 35-year saving is either £11m, just £9,000, or £90m – although Mr Burns blamed Hansard for wrongly recording the last, biggest figure.

Well, I can reveal that the corrected online Hansard now reads, astonishingly, that it would be £207m cheaper to build Wynyard Park than to pull the plug – £5.033bn, against £5.24bn Another cock-up? Who knows – or cares?

The important point is that any of the alleged savings are puny over 35 years – comprehensively demolishing the Government’s case for scrapping Wynyard Park.