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  • "Mr Ross. If Labour's position is to support brownfield development then it needs to ensure that the Local Development Framework reflects this. Currently that document , which will steer house building in the district for the next decade and a half, places a third of new housing in the greenbelt. It justifies this by artificially locking away brownfield sites in the urban centres of Bradford & Keighley for 'employment purposes' using mathematical dodges that would make a hardened fraudster blush. This includes inflating to an extraordinary degree the estimates for the amount of land that would be required to 'home' each new job. At the same time, as any reader of the T&A will know, over 3000 employment sites, including new office blocks, remain untenanted or substantially underused because people do not want to place their businesses in a deteriorating urban centre littered with boarded up buildings & derelict sites. Labour's cynical move to allow massive development in the greenbelt will exacerbate Bradford's decline and leave a poverty stricken and largely ethnic minority population stranded in that wreckage. The houses planned for the greenbelt will largely be for affluent people who work elsewhere (mostly Leeds). If you doubt that think on this: the priority of property developers is to maximise their profits. How they do this is by building houses for those who can pay top dollar for them. How they do that is by cherry picking the best sites and those are in the greenbelt. The Council's job is to ensure that this doesn't happen by directing development and limiting it to the places where it is needed

    Bradford and Keighley could (and should) be the most wonderful places to live and work as they were in the past. They have the most remarkable structure, architecture and settings and what is being planned is criminal.

    Interestingly the Councillors and Officers will, in allowing such massive development in the greenbelt, have engineered an economic miracle of staggering proportions! Because these affluent outsiders have good jobs elsewhere, suddenly Bradford's average household income will have shot up, its unemployment rates will look as though they've been slashed and the housing targets they've signed up to will have been hit."
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£2.9m homes scheme for Eccleshill unveiled

6:50am Saturday 12th May 2012 in News By Tanya O'Rourke

An artist’s impressions of the Eccleshill homes An artist’s impressions of the Eccleshill homes

A £2.9 million scheme for 25 houses on land in Eccleshill, Bradford, has been welcomed by councillors.

The Yorkshire Housing properties will be built in Oakdale Drive and Ravenscliffe Avenue on a site previously occupied by bedsits.

The development, which is expected to be completed in November, will feature two, three and four-bedroom semi-detached properties.

Ward Councillors Geoff Reid and Ruth Billheimer said the development would be good for the area and welcomed the use of brownfield sites for development but said residents would have preferred to see more single-person accommodation and bungalows in the area.

Coun Reid (Lib Dem, Eccleshill) said: “We have to welcome additional housing of any sort in a sense but I expect local people would have been looking, if possible, for bungalows. But given that the plans are there the sooner they get on with it the better.”

He said it would be “good for Eccleshill as a whole” for people to take up properties in the area.

“It’s all very positive,” he added.

The Telegraph & Argus Save Our Green Spaces campaign calls for empty buildings and brownfield sites to be redeveloped before greenfield sites are used.

Supporting the campaign Coun Reid said: “If we are going to say hands off the green spaces we’ve got to go flat out to use already used land that we’ve got.”

Coun Billheimer (Lab, Eccleshill) echoed Coun Reid’s concerns about the need for bungalows but welcomed the development in principle.

“Ravenscliffe is becoming a very interesting mix of different types of housing,” she said. “In principle I think it’s a good thing. Hopefully the principle of a new build will help to regenerate Ravenscliffe and make the area a bit more dynamic. It’s obviously much better to build on brownfield sites than to take green spaces and it’s a good development.”

Contractor Strategic Team Group will be carrying out the project.

Linda Gray, development project manager at Yorkshire Housing, said: “Before we started on the development we consulted with the local community, councillors and the local authorities. It has always been Yorkshire Housing’s intention to build houses in this area based on the feedback we received from people who live locally.

“We were unable to build bungalows in this area as they need to be built on flat land for level access and Oakdale Drive and Ravenscliffe does not have this.”

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