Urban development should consider jobs as well as homes

From: Alan D Elsegood, Chairman, Menston Community Association, Ellar Gardens, Menston.

IT is reassuring to see the Yorkshire Post becoming interested, however belatedly, in the concerns about Yorkshire’s countryside and the threat to it from potential construction (Yorkshire Post, January 23).

There is a marked reluctance on the part of developers to proceed with building on sites for which they already have planning permission, but your figures actually understate how many houses Leeds and Bradford (and presumably other) councils have approved. According to the figures which Leeds and Bradford have respectively published, Leeds has 23,908 dwellings with planning permission but not started (source: Leeds Housing Land Monitor, September 30, 2010) and Bradford has a potential yield of 11,631 dwellings on land with outstanding planning permission plus a further 5,300 on land allocated to the RUDP but for which permission has not yet been granted (source: Bradford Council LDF Annual Monitoring Report, December 2010).

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Bradford states that the 16,931 dwellings already identified is the equivalent of a housing supply “for 6.27 years against the net annual requirement of 2,700 dwellings”. In each case, therefore, these councils would have more than enough to satisfy the requirement for a five year supply, if only the developers would confirm their intention to build within that period.

If they don’t, then the council can’t state that it will meet its target for construction, and this gives the developer scope to apply for more (usually green field land), and to take the councils to appeal if they refuse them permission to build on green field sites.

As Leeds has been unable to say it would meet its five year housing targets, it has lost successive planning appeals, at a hideous cost to the taxpayer. In the 1990s, developers piled into the cities to build flats, and created an over-supply which they couldn’t sell, so they don’t want to repeat that mistake, nor do buyers who lost equity, so the target is now outside the city, in the suburbs and the countryside, where the developers think they’ll get a better return on their investment.

But pushing the city boundaries ever-outwards only increases the cost and volume of commuting and the related delays, waste of energy and pollution.

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Bradford Council admits that the roads and the trains are congested, and that they can’t or won’t do anything significant to change the situation, yet it still aspires to build 3,100 homes in Wharfedale where there’s no work, forcing people to commute.

Together, Leeds and Bradford councils have plans for more than 3,000 new homes along the A65 corridor between Menston and Kirkstall.

These plans are driven, not by demand for housing but by corporate greed and a total disregard for our responsibility to future generations to safeguard irreplaceable green assets.

Let’s reconstruct our cities where people can find work and income, and not allow urban sprawl to engulf the countryside.

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