LET us hope that this time Bradford Council's vision of the future for Wharfedale accords with the people who live in the area.

When the last Unitary Development Plan (UDP) was

produced, howls of protest and despair greeted its

publication.

This time it seems that planners went out of their way to avoid a confrontation with the people who will have to live with the concrete results of their planning blueprint for the next decade or so.

A series of consultations took place before the actual UDP draft was produced.

Hopefully this will avoid the necessity for as protracted and expensive public inquiry as there was five years ago.

Local authority planners will always bear the brunt of the criticism, whether it be from profit-hungry developers who would like to turn the whole of Wharfedale into bricks and concrete, or angry residents who do not want to

see monstrosity after monstrosity plonked on their doorsteps.

Planning officials at City Hall are the 'piggy in the middle' but the nature of their job makes this unenviable position unavoidable.

And the only people who walked away truly happy from the last UDP public inquiry were the planning consultants and lawyers who earned a pretty penny arguing the toss over each issue at great length.

In many cases, such as Manor Garth, Addingham, the planners and the villagers were on the same side but had the rug pulled from under them by a Department of the Environment inspector's seemingly perverse decision to let a historic and beautiful village green be turned into a

housing estate.

With this bitter experience behind us, there now should be more scope for co-operation rather than confrontation.