Village councillors are considering paying for their own grit or buying in snowplough services, to help keep streets clear if another cold winter strikes.

Addingham Parish Council is to consider winter planning strategies including buying more grit bins, buying its own stocks of grit, or bringing in a snowplough, after the recent bad winter.

Councillor Gordon Campbell – jokingly dubbed the village ‘snow Czar’ by vice chairman Councillor Ian Taylor – told Addingham people last week that the council is to consider three options for tackling winter snow and ice.

He said the council is looking into its own measures to tackle the issue, after the hard winter and the local authority’s accompanying grit shortage, which saw many roads and paths in Addingham covered in slippery ice for days.

“It was chaos,” said Coun Campbell. “The estates became no-go areas. People parked on the main streets and the whole village ground to a halt.”

There were only four grit bins in the whole village, he said.

Although he admitted the harsh winter could have been a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, he said the parish council has since been looking into addressing the problem of clearing the streets itself.

The parish council is looking into the possibility of buying grit bins for residential streets which do not fall within Bradford Coucil’s criteria for supplying a bin, and another option is the parish council buying both the bin and supplying its own grit.

But Coun Campbell said another option would be to employ someone to clear the roads.

He said two Addingham residents owned a snowplough, and had been drafted in to clear the privately managed Owler Park Road in Ilkley, and other areas, over the last winter.

Coun Campbell said one of Addingham Parish Council’s options could be to employ them.

He has already looked into the costs and types of grit bins that the council could buy for parts of the village.

Two streets in Addingham were recently successful in their bids for community grit bins funded by Bradford Council’s Keighley Area Committee. Addingham Parish Council agreed to provide the necessary funding for two £35-a-time refills of the bins.

A third street was unsuccessful as initial funding for Keighley Area Committee’s grit bins scheme was quickly used up, due to the popularity of the scheme in the communities it serves.