A demand has been made for Bradford Council to take urgent action on petitions from the public which fall into "black holes" and are said to vanish in City Hall.

Councillor Phil Thornton (Lab, Shipley East) complained people take weeks to collect signatures and have the daunting experience of attending council meetings and making speeches about them.

Now he has put a notice of motion to Tuesday's council meeting asking for a named officer to deal with them.

He wants the officer to handle the petitions and report back to appropriate committees on a fixed timescale.

Coun Thornton spoke out after 600 West Bowling people signed a petition saying they were concerned about proposed housing in the area. But they waited a year for it to reach a scrutiny committee for consideration.

Coun Thornton said there has even been a petition about a petition which appeared to have gone missing.

A petition calling for better Christmas lights in the city centre waited six months to be dealt with - and landed in front on the environment scrutiny committee as the lights were being put up.

Coun Thornton said: "It takes an enormous amount of hard work for people to organise these petitions and get signatures. It is also a difficult experience for them to attend council meetings and speak about their concerns.

"We are finding that more and more petitions are disappearing in the black hole of City Hall. But this is a fundamental part of our democracy.

"It isn't really surprising if they are about contentious issues and disappear. But if we can't act on them, we should tell the petitioners the truth."

Coun Thornton says there should be timetables and a official system.

Deputy Council leader Councillor Richard Wightman said: "It does seem to happen too often and part of the reason is that there does not appear to be one common route for petitions to go down.

"If elected members receive petitions they take them straight to committee secretariat.

"But it seems they may go down other routes if they are submitted in other ways."

He said Council leader Coun Margaret Eaton is working to ensure the system was streamlined.