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Disused factory buildings in Guiseley are being pulled down and housing developments put on a number of sites, which has brought fears that the infrastructure will not be able to deal with the influx of people and cars. These homes are going up on the old Silver Cross site.

IN the days leading up to Christmas, council leaders in Leeds and Bradford made the decisions which will see planners scouring both districts for space to locate 130,000 new homes in the next 20 years.

The way they do it will have profound effects on the people of Wharfedale and Aireborough.

Executive meetings in both cities were told that Bradford will need to find space for 50,000 new houses and Leeds will need to find 80,000.

The figures mean that not only is the green belt under serious threat, the pressure on the local infrastructure will be enormous.

Schools, medical services, dentists, roads, railways and the whole range of council services will need to expand at the same rate to keep pace with the growth in population.

Left alone, the Bradford district has a growing population and by 2029, predictions show a rise by 109,700 to 594,3000.

Bradford Council has to plan for not only this growth in population but a further expansion by the housing strategy proposed by the Government.

If the mandarins at City Hall try to bury their heads in the sand and hope that the bad things will go away, the reality is that Government planning inspectors will descend on the district and, with the help of developers, find the space for the new houses.

Work at the former All Saints School site in Ilkley

That would be even more of a disaster for the area, planners believe. Freedom of action is limited and they have been forced to offer the district a chance to have a say on a choice of four policies which are in effect, unwanted by anyone.

In late December, the executive meeting at City Hall approved the four options to be put out for public consultation.

Ilkley councillor Anne Hawkesworth said: "As it stands, there are four options to be considered. None of them is a preferred option. Indeed, they all fill me with horror."

Not the most auspicious start for a planning strategy.

The first option identifies Keighley and Ilkley as principal towns in the district and suggests that 15,000 new homes are shared between the two settlements.

Another 2,500 houses will be shared between what are termed local service centres'. These are mainly the Bradford district's 18 or so rural villages including Addingham, Burley-in-Wharfedale, and Menston.

Coun Hawkesworth believes that the each settlement will fight tooth and nail to save its own green belt, resulting in villages going head-to-head in a battle to resist the spread of concrete.

"Put bluntly, this consultation has the potential to set community against community," said Councillor Hawkesworth.

Planners have one more chance of persuading Government to see, in Coun Hawkesworth's words the folly of its ways'.

"If you look at the landscape map there is nowhere for them to go - it is just horrendous," said Coun Hawkesworth.

But the mood among officers is not confident that Housing Minister Yvette Cooper will change her mind and back down over the figures when she considers the councils' objections early in the new year.

What residents of Wharfedale will now have to do is carefully consider what is on offer and decide which is the lesser of many evils. The first two options suggest around 15 per cent of the houses will be located in Ilkley while the third option has a figure of around seven or eight per cent.

The last option (Four) proposes the fewest number of extra houses for Ilkley but this would a mean bigger share of the total in Menston and Burley-in-Wharfedale.

Both villages have seen phenomenal growth in housing since the building of the Burley by-pass and the closure of two sprawling psychiatric hospitals. It could be argued that they are not just bigger than they were 12 years ago but are completely different places as a result.

And in Menston, its location on border with the Leeds district could see even more houses built from the Otley direction as planners there look for new development land.

Leeds is in a similar position to Bradford with development targets threatening green belt areas in Aireborough, Otley, Bramhope and Pool-in-Wharfedale.

The Government wants to see more than 80,000 homes in the Leeds District by 2026. A report to the meeting of the Leeds executive says: "There are fundamental concerns regarding the level of infrastructure which is likely to be required to support the scale of growth proposed."

The very word development' is enough to make valley residents throw up their hands in horror while house builders and estate agents uncork the champagne as soon as they secure a new deal on the Holy Grail of West Yorkshire real estate.

As with most planning documents, The Local Development Framework for Bradford might make readers want to fall asleep by the third page but unless its implications are studied very seriously, residents across Wharfedale will wake up to the nightmare of a rash of new houses where there used to be green fields.

Chris Greaves is the chairman of the Keighley Area Planning Panel, a Menston resident and a district councillor for Wharfedale Ward. He said: "What worries me more is that there is no infrastructure. You can't just stick houses on land. You need to have the trains to get people to work. We don't have the schools to teach the children in, or the library books for people to read.

"The trains to Leeds are already overcrowded to put more houses down without sorting out the rail and the road system would be a complete nightmare."

He said that the only way to increase the number of commuters local trains could carry would be to finance a deal backed by a commercial investor through a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which is paid back over a number of years.

"To increase the Wharfedale and Airedale lines from four to five carriages would cost £8 million a year for 30 years under a PFI agreement," Coun Greaves said.

He added: "There is no way Bradford or even the region can afford that amount of money. It would need central government investment. The roads are totally inadequate and things would fall apart."

Kris Hopkins (Con, Worth Valley) the leader of Bradford Council and the man who on behalf of the Conservative Party will try to wrest the Ilkley and Keighley Parliamentary Constituency from Labour's Ann Cryer at the next General Election, is the chairman of the Yorkshire and Humber Assembly's housing board.

He said: "I'm concerned that it is people very distant from Yorkshire who are busy arbitrarily carving swathes of land rather than understanding our own communities."

"Local government can be criticised for many things but I know where the green belt starts and ends, which areas need regeneration and which communities need help."

Both councils will discover early this year whether the Government is likely to insist that its original high targets will form the basis of housing development policy for the next 20 years.

8:15am Thursday 10th January 2008

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