PLANS to downgrade nine children’s centres and restructure the service across the district came under the spotlight at a council scrutiny meeting.

The cost-cutting plans were approved by Bradford Council’s executive earlier this month, but the council’s Conservative group was not happy and its spokesman for children’s services, Cllr Debbie Davies, asked for a review.

The children’s services overview and scrutiny committee dissected the plans.

Under the proposals, none of the 41 current children’s centre buildings would close, but nine – including Daisy Chain in Silsden and Treetops at Haworth – would no longer be Ofsted-registered and would instead be 'delivery sites', providing fewer services.

All the district’s children’s centres would be operated in clusters.

Although Cllr Davies could not be at the meeting, she wrote in to express her concerns at how the funding had been allocated to each cluster, which was partly based on the number of eligible children in each area.

Her letter said: “Although the population of nought- to four-year-olds in each cluster is listed, there is no mention of how many children currently use each centre.

“Surely these figures would give a better idea of how popular each centre is, as the population figures are merely potential users not actual users?”

The committee has drafted a host of recommended tweaks for the executive to consider.

These were to re-do the financial modelling used to work out how much funding each cluster would get, and to consider extending the deadline by three months for those wanting to apply to run a cluster.