SMALL housing schemes are adding up to a big problem on the district's roads, senior councillors have warned.

Next month, councillors leading the district's planning committees will hold top-level talks about their fears that traffic generated by small-scale housing developments are causing gridlock on the roads.

Under national planning rules, building schemes that "generate significant amounts of movement" should be accompanied by an assessment of how they will affect the highways.

This often means that large-scale housing developments come with developer-funded improvements to nearby junctions and traffic bottlenecks.

But councillors fear that smaller-scale housebuilding schemes, which don't require these assessments, are having a big cumulative impact on the district's congestion problems.

Next month, the chairmen and deputy chairmen of the regulatory and appeals committee, Bradford planning panel and Keighley planning panel will hold a behind-closed-doors meeting with deputy council leader and planning boss Councillor Val Slater to discuss the problem.

Keighley planning panel chairman, Councillor Shabir Hussain (Lab, Manningham) said two weeks ago, he nearly missed a flight from Manchester after getting caught up in traffic in Bradford.

He said driving the few miles along Manningham Lane, through the city centre, along Manchester Road and out to the M606 took him 40 minutes, while the rest of the journey to Manchester Airport took him just half an hour.

Cllr Hussain, who also sits on the regulatory and appeals committee, said while the district did need more homes, he was worried about the effect this would have on the roads.

He said: "It is getting busier and busier over time. Where do we stop?"

He said if it took commuters "45 minutes to go home, a mile-and-a-half away", it could put people off living in the city at all.

He said: "We really do need help."

Cllr Hussain's concerns were echoed by fellow regulatory and appeals committee member Councillor Jackie Whiteley (Con, Wharfedale).

She said under the current system, they were failing to see the "big picture" created by smaller developments, saying that many new-build houses were likely to be occupied by people with at least two cars.

She said: "We have got to have a policy that thinks about the effect of all these houses on parking, particularly parking at train stations."

But Cllr Slater said a solution was in sight.

The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), introduced this year by the Government, charges developers a fee for infrastructure per dwelling.

She said: "The situation will alter once we have got CIL because it applies to every building, whether there is one, or 60, or 600."

Bradford is in the process of introducing the levy, and Cllr Slater said she hoped to take it to a meeting of the full council in December.