Fury over house building blueprint ‘chaos’

Harrogate Borough Council has announced an extraordinary meeting will be held on Wednesday next week a fortnight after it had been hoped that a draft Local Plan, which sets out the house building programme across the district over the next decade, had been due to be approved.

Senior officials at the council confirmed to the Yorkshire Post yesterday that the proposals are having to be looked at once again after grave concerns were expressed over the locations earmarked for development and the viability of the vision. Critics have already branded the proposals as the biggest encroachment on the district’s green spaces for decades, and opposition members from the Liberal Democrat group claimed the latest delays are undermining confidence in the vision to build up to 4,000 new homes across the area up until 2022.

The deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Coun Pat Marsh, said: “It is so important that we get this right, as this will map out development for the coming years. There is a very real danger that mistakes could be made, and this would ruin what is such a wonderful place to live for generations to come.

“I do not have confidence in anything to do with the plan, whether it be the actual allocation of homes, whether there is the necessary infrastructure in place to cope and how members will be able to decide on the final proposals which are still being finalised. I have been a councillor for 22 years, but I have never experienced anything quite like this. It is a complete shambles.”

Work on the Local Plan began in 2004 in its previous guise of the Local Development Framework, although detailed proposals have been drawn up over the last three years. The Government unveiled a new raft of national planning policies earlier this year which meant the proposals have already had to be tweaked.

Senior planning officials confirmed a revised Local Plan is due to go before the cabinet on Monday before the extraordinary council meeting is held two days later to discuss the new proposals. Members of the Residents Against Spoiling Harrogate (RASH) group have urged the council to provide a clear vision for development.

Terry Byrne, the Harlow and Pannal Ash Residents Association’s chairman and a founding member of RASH, said: “We need to have clarity so that we are able to formulate our own opinions on the plans. At there moment there are so many questions that remain unanswered.”

A total of 2,200 new homes have been earmarked for Harrogate with 760 properties for Knaresborough and another 160 for Ripon. The towns of Boroughbridge, Masham and Pateley Bridge would see nearly 400 homes built between them, with the remainder in villages including Killinghall, Tockwith and Hampsthwaite.

The council’s cabinet member for planning, Coun Alan Skidmore, admitted the authority could be faced with legal challenges from developers through costly public inquiries if a plan is not put in place.

But he added: “I am confident that I will be able to present a good plan to the council on Wednesday next week. There will be issues that some people agree with and others that they disagree with, but it will be for the 53 members to decide whether the plan should be approved.”

Figures from the Land Registry have shown that the average cost of a property in the Harrogate area between April and June this year was £271,207 - an increase of 2.3 per cent on the previous year.