THE future of a proposed town council for Guiseley is in the balance with a recommendation that the scheme should be rejected.

Councillors are being told the request should be turned down because people living in Hawksworth and Menston do not want to be part of the scheme.

Leeds City Council’s Electoral Working Group is recommending that the boundaries for the proposed council area should be redrawn to remove the two districts from the application.

A crucial decision on the issue is now set to be taken at a meeting of the council’s General Purposes committee next week – and campaigners are appealing for support from councillors and local people.

The committee will be asked to decide whether to confirm the request for a town council for Guiseley or to refuse it. That decision will then have to go to Full Council for approval.

Petition organiser David Bowe said the vote in the general purposes committee was critically important. He stressed it was not too late to save the council proposal but action was needed.

“I will be seeking an urgent meeting with Labour councillors to try and persuade them of the merits of supporting the proposal,” he said.

He argued it was essential that the committee should reject the advice and vote instead to set up the town council in Guiseley.

He stressed: “Accepting any proposals for changes to the boundaries of the proposed town council would only result in a new procedure being required resulting in considerable delay and also some additional expenses.

“A further consequence of the actions proposed in the report if agreed would be to leave a substantial area of land currently under consideration by developers between Guiseley and Menston outside the boundaries of any future Guiseley Town Council and therefore with no local body with statutory rights of consultation on any planning applications for potential future housing.”

Mr Bowe said campaigners had been “caught on the hop” by a very tight consultation period of just five weeks.

Mr Bowe also said that while it took time for them to mobilise support in the community, opponents of the scheme sent out about 2,000 letters to local people.

He stressed that whatever the result of the meeting on February 12, the idea of a town council would not be dropped.

“We are not giving up,” he said.

“If this goes down then we are going to start again.”

The petition, which was signed by 1,179 people, was submitted to Leeds City Council in August last year.