Legal advice will be taken by Bradford council on whether it can ban all housing development in the Aire Valley.

Councillors this week decided to call in outside consultants in the escalating row over the sewerage system serving areas including Silsden and Steeton.

The decision came despite a recommendation by council officers that housing developments not be suspended.

The officials' report also recommended that Yorkshire Water's Drainage Area Plan be used to assess the impact of proposed development on the current sewer system.

The council report was described by campaigner John Walker, of Halsteads Way, Steeton, as 'inaccurate, flawed and misleading'.

He and fellow residents are demanding the drainage system be improved before the construction of an estimated 1,500 new homes in the area. They say sewage regularly bursts out of manholes and spills into gardens, especially in the Steeton area, and believe the system will not cope with extra homes.

Yorkshire Water agrees, saying the system needs to be upgraded to cope with the extra houses.

Bradford council has come under pressure to stop building new houses around Silsden and Steeton until the situation is fully resolved and the sewerage system upgraded. But council officers have indicated that they would prefer to deal with planning applications for new houses on an individual basis, as they come up, rather than imposing a full-scale ban.

However, the council's planning committee this week decided to bring in independent experts because members felt they have been going round in circles for months.

Council officers make recommendations to committees which are made up of elected councillors who actually make the decisions.

Head of planning Alan Mainwaring will write to Yorkshire Water expressing concern about the way the company is handling the situation.

He will ask for full details of its investment programme and write to water watchdog OFWAT and the Environment Agency.

Council officers told the committee that the Drainage Plan plan would make sure the system could cope with extra sewage.

But campaigner Mr Walker said figures given in the plan were based on almost 300 too few new homes.

Officials told the committee they had supplied the correct housing figures to Yorkshire Water and there must have been a 'transcription error'.

Yorkshire Water later insisted its report was based on figures included in Bradford council's original Unitary Development Plan, its future land-use blueprint.

A spokesman says: "The council informed Yorkshire Water it had since revised these figures and asked us to re-run our model with the new information."

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