A MULTI-MILLION pound junction upgrade planned for a traffic bottleneck is “descending into farce”, according to an angry local councillor.

The £6.8 million scheme at Greengates aims to remodel the busy crossroads where Harrogate Road, one of the main routes into Bradford, meets New Line.

But Councillor Dominic Fear has warned council highways bosses that the planning applications are being lodged piecemeal, leaving local residents in the dark about the full picture.

He said: “The public are being asked to look at one piece of the jigsaw at a time which in my opinion is bad practice and the whole process is descending into farce.

“This is a major junction and people have to live with it for a lifetime, the least we can do is let them see the whole picture.”

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Cllr Fear (Lib Dem Idle and Thackley) has written to the strategic director for planning, Julian Jackson, urging him to take a look at the situation.

In his letter, he says planning applications dealing with small parts of the scheme are coming out in “dribs and drabs”.

He says: “This means that a person may look at one application and see there is a parking restriction and think, ‘That’s no problem, I’ll park on the other side of the road or further up the road’, without knowing that there will be another application as part of the same larger plan, to restrict parking in those places as well.”

He says that by the time of the next application, however, “it’ll be too late to do anything about it”.

Cllr Fear’s letter also says one application, lodged by the Council’s highways team, contains some “some pretty glaring highways errors”.

This includes disabled parking spaces which do not meet disability standards and a scheme which only gives turning room for 8m-long bin lorries, not the 11.6m-long bin lorries used in Bradford, according to the authority’s own documents.

Richard Gelder, highway services manager at Bradford Council, said: “We have already run a number of consultation events on the whole project which were well attended and we have received significant feedback.

“As we progress with the scheme, not all of it needs to go through the planning process. Once this particular phase is complete, we will consult again on the proposed final version of the overall project.

“This will give residents another opportunity to discuss parking and the impact on businesses at the junction.

“Community engagement remains a key driver for ensuring this project is successfully delivered.”