A LAST-DITCH bid to force Bradford Council bosses to slash their housing targets failed this week, as the authority ratified a key part of its controversial Local Plan.

There were passionate speeches from all sides of City Hall’s council chamber on Tuesday as councillors debated the best way to earmark land for developers in the coming years.

The plan’s core strategy sets out the need for 42,100 new homes by 2030, as well as providing a blueprint for industry and infrastructure. Targets include 1,200 houses for Silsden, 700 for Steeton-with-Eastburn, and several hundred in the Worth Valley.

Ilkley councillor Anne Hawkesworth said Leeds City Council was now having to slash its housing targets by more than a fifth and made an unsuccessful appeal for Bradford to review it should do the same.

Cllr Alex Ross-Shaw, Labour’s portfolio holder for planning, said Leeds had adopted its core strategy three years ago and while Bradford didn’t have one, it meant the district was a developer free-for-all.

He said Bradford’s core strategy would only earmark two per cent of the Green Belt for development and also aimed to halve the number of empty homes across the district.

This “enables us to protect the rest of the Green Belt”, he said.

Councillor Simon Cooke (Bingley Rural), leader of the Conservative group, claimed the plan wouldn’t work because it didn’t tackle the issue of why developers didn’t want to build in the inner city.

Much of the debate centred around whether housebuilding was being concentrated in the right places, with opposition groups claiming there would be too many expensive homes built in leafy areas.

Speaking after the meeting, Keighley MP John Grogan said that if the council had not adopted the plan then there would have been a “free for all” allowing developers to apply to build on any site.

He said: “The next stage of the process is the allocation of specific sites for development and the council must get this difficult job right.

“They need to prioritise brownfield development wherever possible as has been promised.”

Mr Grogan called for future developments to include decent and affordable housing for families and young people in Keighley.

Craven ward councillor Adrian Naylor agreed the Local Plan needed to be adopted to protect against developers, but said the plan was based on out-of-date data including job projections.

He said most of the jobs were actually in urban areas generating a huge need for affordable housing.

He added: “Building out in the leafy suburbs is not where the housing is needed. We’re going to end up with Leeds cutting housing targets to save their greenbelt, and we’re building the houses for people to live in while working in Leeds.”