SECRET recordings of councillor Greg Stone offering insider planning advice to businesses cast fresh doubt on his role in a student housing bid, senior Labour figures say.

MP for Newcastle East Nick Brown has called for the Newcastle City Council Standards Committee to look again at their decision to clear Coun Stone of wrong-doing relating to his role in a student housing complex at Stoddart Street in Shieldfield in 2008.

His demands come after Coun Stone was video-taped offering “tricks of the trade” to businesses needing planning application advice by undercover Daily Telegraph reporters.

The Liberal Democrat representative for High Heaton, who works as a planning consultant for firm Indigo Public Affairs, was investigated in 2008 after leaked paperwork appeared to link him to a document detailing likely voting intentions and pen-portraits of members of the city’s development control committee. The information related to Indigo’s consultancy role with the builders of the Stoddart Street student accommodation block.

While he was cleared of breaching standards by the council’s standards sub-committee in 2009, Mr Brown believes his latest comments cast new doubts on his role in the affair.

He said: “The history of the Stoddart Street development fills me with concern. I still cannot understand how planning permission was granted for a building that seems to me to represent a substantial overdevelopment of the site.

“It is essential that the council re-investigate the inquiry into his activities in 2008 in light of new evidence uncovered by the Daily Telegraph.”

Coun Stone does not sit on Newcastle City Council’s planning committee and his Lib Dem party group leader David Faulkner insists he has always declared his work with Indigo.

In Mr Brown’s letter to the city council’s chief executive Pat Ritchie, he states: “Given what is now known about these methods used to influence planning committees, is it not the case that the balance of probabilities, the test applied in the previous investigation, has now been tipped towards the suspicion of wrong-doing?”

His move has been backed by North Durham MP Kevan Jones, who asks that Coun Stone should also publicly list all the planning applications that he has been involved in the North East.

Alex Ritson, head of strategy for Indigo Public Affairs Limited, said: “Greg has worked on no schemes in Newcastle in the last 12 months.

“This is because Indigo’s code of conduct prevents him from doing so. The code, which we introduced in 2008, goes way beyond what is required by law. Greg, in common with all Indigo staff who are serving councillors, will never work on projects in their own area.”