Miliband promises the North an English deal on devolution

The Labour leader criticised the Coalition for watering down proposals from its own adviser, former Deputy Prime Minister Lord Heseltine, that would have seen decisions over how billions of pounds are spent shifted from London to the regions.

And he backed calls from Leeds Central MP Hilary Benn, the Shadow Local Government Secretary, for a “New English Deal” building on devolution to Scotland and Wales.

“Michael Heseltine proposed quite a radical agenda on devolution and the Government went along with it about one per cent and we want to make good on that devolution agenda,” Mr Miliband said.

“It’s really important, we are not going to be able to change Britain just pulling the levers in Whitehall. We’ve got to make sure we really devolve power.

“It’s hard this because you’ve got to take power out of Whitehall but I am totally committed to that and we’re going to be saying more about this in the coming months.

“I am totally committed to this agenda because we are too centralised a country, too centralised in London.”

The public consultation on the route of HS2 from Birmingham to Yorkshire closed on Friday. Labour’s support for the project appeared to waiver last year with Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls asking whether HS2 would be “the best way to spend £50bn for the future of our country”.

Last week, Wakefield councillors voted to oppose the scheme and called for other high speed rail options to be considered as part of a wider debate on transport spending in the North but Sheffield City Council leader Julie Dore described it as a “once in a lifetime opportunity”. During a visit to the Yorkshire Post’s Leeds offices, Mr Miliband said Labour wanted to see what suggestions new HS2 chairman Sir David Higgins will make over how the project’s costs can be controlled.

“We do support it, I’ve been consistent in saying we support it but we’ve got to make sure it is value for money.

“We announced some pretty tough fiscal plans last weekend. People would expect that we would go through a process of saying any, particularly in times of such difficult financial circumstances, anything that we are doing – any big project, particularly a big project like that – we make sure that it is value for money and that’s what we are embarked on.”

Earlier in the day, the Doncaster North MP had visited a housing development in Pudsey, one of Labour’s target seats for 2015.

Labour has promised to deliver 200,000 new homes a year by 2020 and Mr Miliband said it was important to support councils such as York which has outlined proposals that could see 22,000 homes built over 15 years.

“I think it’s one of the biggest priorities for the next Government because unless we tackle the housing challenge we are not going to solve the cost of living crisis I’ve been talking about,” he said.

“If you are not going to just have higher and higher house prices which put things further and further out of reach you’ve got to take action on the supply side as well as the demand side, we’ve got to make sure that we build the homes.

“That’s everything from identifying new towns and garden cities – which they’ve said they are going to do and have totally failed to do – to making sure you don’t let developers just corner the market and fail to build, to councils that want to expand and are blocked by other councils and making sure they’ve got the right to grow.”