Bradford Community Housing Trust has been shamed in Parliament for allegedly causing many of its tenants to live in squalor.

In a Commons debate on housing standards on Tuesday, Keighley MP Ann Cryer told how BCHT - the district's biggest provider of social housing - has admitted to tenants on one housing estate that their homes needed £45,000 of repairs each.

The scandal has previously been reported in the Keighley News.

But Mrs Cryer said attempts to get an explanation about how the self-confessed problem on the Woodhouse estate, in Keighley, was to be resolved resulted in her being accused of electioneering.

She said: "MPs may be accused of that whatever we do. Perhaps the trust would have me do nothing about anything.

"However, the fact that it has repeatedly failed to answer legitimate questions from an elected representative and the diligent councillors for the ward is reprehensible. We should have been aware of the possibility of this type of problem at the time of stock transfer.

"Taking publicly-owned property and transferring it to a quasi-private body without democratic accountability was always likely to be a recipe for disaster."

Mrs Cryer told the Commons how BCHT, which owns 22,000 homes across the Bradford Council district, had refused to allow one of her constituents, who had served time in prison, to bid for a property and criticised them for judging a person who wanted to rebuild her life with her family.

She said: "BCHT believed that the punishment handed down by the courts was insufficient. It was hardly for the trust to comment in that way."

The Labour MP said attempts to get answers about the conditions have failed and instead constituents were told there was a 30-year business plan which people had not been allowed to see. And she told ministers Bradford Council chiefs had told her to stop "damaging" the area with her comment and that she was wrong.

She told MPs she wanted to see "an open and robust commitment" to deal with the problems of the Woodhouse estate, including a detailed plan and schedules for repair.

And she added: "I want my constituents to be treated with the respect that they deserve rather than being seen as an inconvenience. I want them to be given the right to live in a home that is not harmful to them.

"Addressing social injustices is what we, and what social landlords, should be about.

"I do not wish to damage BCHT, but I do not believe that adopting the ostrich position in dealing with such difficult issues is beneficial to anyone."

BCHT would not comment on Mrs Cryer's speech.