Drainage fears over flooding: The week that was January 31 to February 6, 1996.

Farmers and environmentalists said that a drainage trench system called ‘moorland gripping’ had contributed to a disaster in the Dales.

They claimed that trench-digging, funded by the Ministry of Agriculture in the 1950s and 60s to improve thousands of acres of boggy farmland, had actually drained water too quickly from the hills, heightening the chances of flooding riverside areas downstream.

The claims came exactly a year after parts of North Yorkshire were hit by some of the worst floods in living memory as melting snow and record rainfall turned placid rivers into torrents, bursting their banks and swamping fields, roads, bridges and homes.

Moorland gripping had been abandoned in the 1970s, and a Ministry of Agriculture spokesman now admitted that the government had changed its views on the method because of the damage caused.

Health campaigners, MPs and councillors were calling for an inquiry into healthcare in Calderdale because admissions to hospital were rising sharply, yet managers wanted to centralise services in one hospital, reducing the number of beds in the local NHS Trust from 900 to 600.

In two years, medical admissions had risen 31 per cent. Lib Dem councillor Bob Hays, a former doctor, said the problem was exacerbated by high admissions of elderly people who were not properly supervised in their homes owing to a lack of adequate social care provision.

A free-for-all scavenging frenzy on the Humberside coast finally went up in smoke, when customs officers said they had burned millions of cigarettes worth hundreds of thousands of pounds which had been left high and dry in a 40ft cargo container on Fraisthorpe beach, near Bridlington.

The container had been washed overboard from a Dutch cargo vessel bound for Rotterdam from Teesside. The cigarettes caused a beach combing bonanza for hundreds of people, after news of the duty-free windfall spread. Before customs officers took charge of the situation, hundreds of packets of the cigarettes usually retailing at £2.94 were reported to be on sale in the pubs of Bridlington for between 50 pence and £1.

An extra 150 police officers were to be recruited for streets of South Yorkshire, thanks to a £7.5m increase in Home Office funding. The annual budget for the county was raised from £147.2m to £154.7m – a hike that was warmly welcomed by Chief Constable Richard Wells.

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock sparked off a furious row at Westminster for allowing the Spanish national airline Iberia to receive £440m of state aid. In his position as European Union Transport Commissioner, Mr Kinnock said the cash for the struggling airline was not state aid in the traditional sense, and that the EU was committed to phasing out subsidies for airlines.

But Transport Secretary Sir George Young described the ruling as a “depressing decision that threatens to undermine all our effort to establish fair competition in the Community aviation market”.

The Yorkshire Post also reported that a lorry loaded with explosives crashed into the Central Bank in Sri Lankan capital Colombo’s financial district, killing 91 people and injuring at least 1,400 more.

The authorities said the attack was a suicide mission by members of the separatist Tamil Tigers group, whose campaign for an independent homeland had taken a toll of 40,000 people over 12 years.