Delays over decisions on supermarket schemes for Shipley have been branded a disgrace by a boss of one of the three rival developments.

Tim Considine is joint managing director of shopfitting firm Cardinal, who want to develop their site at Airedale Mills, enabling them to relocate to a more suitable location for their nationwide business.

He has spoken of his “huge frustration” at Bradford planners’ decision to delay judgement on both his and the Crossley Evans site development, which was due to be decided on September 23.

Any verdict has now been put back to at least November, due to Morrisons and Skipton Properties’ new “Shipley Exchange” proposal for Crag Road, which was unveiled to the public on Thursday.

“From a business point of view it’s a bit of a disgrace,” Mr Considine said.

“We have jumped through every single hoop and at the 11th hour it was kept in abeyance because the Crossley Evans site came up and now at the 11th hour again it’s been delayed.

“It beggars belief in a way – what happens if another site and proposal pops up? We can’t just wait around for people to just pop out of the woodwork because it means we can’t negotiate with anyone regarding our future plans.

“As we have been saying for a long time we need clarity on our site. Our application has been in since January and since then the business has been in a state of limbo.

Referring to the Morrisons joint housing and supermarket plan he added: ‘We were very surprised that these plans have come out at such a late stage. Clearly they are in the very early stages with very little detail.

“These new plans are quite clearly longer-term aspirations for the site in question and will need to be subject to the normal planning process, including the normal pre-application consultation process.

“Given the nature and scale of the development envisaged, we can’t see proposals formally progressing for some time yet. It really has caused huge frustration,” Mr Considine said.

A spokesman for the Morrisons development said they were working at full speed to produce a planning application for Bradford Council to begin processing.

“Our consultation with the public went extremely well and we got hundreds of feedback forms, which we are currently sifting through and which will make part of our planning application,” the spokesman said.