Housing demand creates a difficult balancing act for countryside council

WHILE the scale of growth predicted in Yorkshire's major cities is remarkable, perhaps more surprising still are predictions of a population explosion in many of the region's rural areas.

Few places will feel the change as markedly as the district of Selby, which stretching from the southern edges of York down to the M62 corridor incorporates the town itself plus surrounding rural villages.

It is an area long considered attractive to affluent commuters who work in the larger cities nearby, but seek a more rural setting for their home life.

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The latest projections show the district's 82,000-strong population leaping by more than 27 per cent over the next quarter of a century – a rate of growth beaten only by Leeds and Bradford in the whole of the Yorkshire region. District council leader Mark Crane said: "Selby has already grown significantly over the last 10 to 15 years, and the challenge for the council has been finding the correct places to build the housing.

"The other challenge has been to find a significant number of extra jobs in the area for people who move here to be able to work here as well. We are concerned that we don't just turn into a commuter area for these larger towns."

The council has drawn up plans to allow the construction of some 440 houses a year – around 11,000 new homes over 25 years – with building "predominantly" focused on the district's three main settlements of Selby, Tadcaster and Sherburn-in-Elmet.

The problem, Coun Crane admits, will be finding enough sites of sufficient size which local people feel are appropriate for development. He points to the under-construction Staynor Hall estate on the southern edge of Selby as one recent success story, where around half the 1,000 new houses planned have now been built, with few complaints from people living nearby.

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"We were lucky in the case of Staynor Hall in that there were very few objections from local people – but sites like that will become increasingly difficult to find," he said. "At the moment when you look to build even a medium-sized development, you will find a lot of people have concerns about it.

"One of the reasons people move to Selby is that it's a fairly rural environment. But the more houses you build there, the less it becomes so. It's one of the reasons I moved here myself, and I don't want to be the man who builds over all that.

"So you have to juggle the two things, and it is very difficult. A council has a responsibility to people to try to find extra houses for them, but equally to be sympathetic to local people who live in an area and don't want to see it over-developed."

The scale of the challenge is daunting, with Coun Crane describing it as the "most important issue" facing his team of councillors every day.

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"If I make a mistake in the way I organise the bin collections, I can change that the following week, or month, or year," he said. "If I make a mistake in where we build 1,000 houses, I can never undo that."