YP Letters: Villagers paying for the incompetence of council planners

DEBORAH Langhorn (The Yorkshire Post, August 8) and Alec Denton (August 9) have recently written against the proposal for the village of Green Hammerton and its neighbouring villages to be the site for a new settlement called ‘Great (sic) Hammerton’.

I have lived in the village for the past 45 years and love the area dearly. I fear that we are just one of many victims in the Harrogate district due to the soon-to-be-decided next phase of planning by Harrogate Borough Council.

As I drive around the district, I see an ever-increasing number of banners and plaques erected by enraged residents who fear the places they have chosen to call home are about to undergo unprecedented change.

I realise house-building is necessary, as my village has doubled in size in my years here, and four sites – two of which are already under way – will do this again in the next two years. However the figures quoted by Coun Rebecca Burnett and her minions seem excessive, to say the very least. Pannal, Killinghall, various areas of Harrogate and many more all seem to be threatened by the circling developers, keen to make huge profits whilst the local council encourage the feeding frenzy.

What we are all paying for is the council’s incompetence over many years. Meeting targets is what matters for Ms Burnett. In our small area of the district, we could soon see a development that will take the best part of two decades to build with no infrastructure to support the town that will result. The A59 is as busy a road as I travel on, bar major motorways and the rail system, cited as being the major factor in the decision-making process, is archaic.

The incinerator at Allerton Park stands ready to be fired up with the associated traffic problems it will cause; a business park of considerable size will nestle across the M1 soon enough and a monstrosity of a sugarbeet factory could soon also loom over Marton cum Grafton, the gateway to Harrogate and huge swathes of the Vale of York.

Add to this the asphalt plant York Council seem so keen to site five miles up the A59 at Hessay with its 100 trucks a day adding to the chaos and I, for one, will have to make the difficult decision to leave the community I have called home for all but two years of my life.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that communities such as Green Hammerton and Flaxby have been pitched against each other in a desperate fight to protect their villages when the real enemy is Harrogate Borough Council’s planning department.