Population time bomb for region

However, today's predictions that Yorkshire is facing a population explosion that has not been seen for a generation and beyond must be taken with the utmost seriousness.

Make no mistake – these are seismic changes ahead. Adding more than a million people to the existing population of Yorkshire means the equivalent of constructing two more cities over a 20-year period that are comparable in size to Leeds and Wakefield.

It means hundreds of thousands more jobs to find, hundreds of thousands of homes to be built and hundreds of millions of pounds for new schools, health services and transport systems to be found from already stretched public finances.

The challenges are daunting. But as regional business leaders and economists make clear today, the potential prizes on offer are immense.

Rarely will Yorkshire be handed a better opportunity to lobby the Government for the improved and fairer funding that it has been demanding for so long.

The arguments are surely too powerful to be ignored.

How can Leeds, now confirmed as the fastest-growing city in the North and set to expand by one third over the next 20 years, be expected to prosper without the modern transport system enjoyed by so many of its neighbours?

How can rural areas such as Selby or the East Riding be expected to meet the needs of their soaring populations without real long-term investment in their creaking infrastructure?

The key issue, of course, is whether the money will actually materialise. Yorkshire's councils are braced for huge budget cuts in the spending review, and significant capital projects across the country will be postponed or, worse still, scrapped altogether.

The obvious need to reduce the deficit in no way alleviates the Government's responsibility to plan carefully for the future, and prevent key infrastructure buckling under the weight of a rapidly-expanding population.

And the buck does not just stop there. Local authority leaders will have a critical role to play, with housebuilding required on a truly demanding scale.

The coalition Government has scrapped the regional house-building targets so beloved of Labour in favour of a bottom-down approach led by the local councils themselves. They must choose the number, and – crucially – the location, wisely. They must also work together; acting in isolation will not suffice.

For residents across the region will be unforgiving of councillors who permit Yorkshire's coming 21st century boom to spoil the essential character of its market towns, its historic villages and its iconic countryside for the future generations to come.