LAST week the RASH (Residents Against Spoiling Harrogate) committee organised a public meeting at Ashville College to consider the current conclusions of the council as to how to provide for the allocated housing quota for our district. The scope and thoroughness of the research that went into the RASH presentation was excellent and resulted in a comprehensive explanation of the situation. The content and presentation were excellent, supplemented by a considerable array of maps.

It is very difficult to understand the complicated documents that make up the Harrogate and Knaresborough Urban Extension Study Volume 2. However, the council's strategy seems unchanged compared to its original plans about which the Planning Inspector clearly had major reservations. The Civic Society shares the RASH concerns about the approach currently being taken by the council in trying to justify the choice of two large areas of greenfield land (Cardale Park West and Pennypot Lane) for longer term housing development.

The Civic Society cannot agree that these large greenfield sites should be allocated to housing development. The council claim to be debarred by Government Planning Policy for Housing from including estimates for ‘windfall’ sites and that the inclusion of the two large greenfield sites or several smaller ones therefore becomes inevitable.

The Civic Society believes that, based on past experience and 'windfall' forecasts, large greenfield sites are not justified – particularly since the council's own forecasts admit that 66 per cent of the district's housing requirement could be provided by 'windfall' site development'. For Harrogate town itself, this figure is even higher at 69 per cent! And yet, the council seems strangely reluctant to push such an argument strongly in its housing strategy, even when government policy would have development kept to brownfield sites as far as possible.

Use of these greenfield sites has major implications. For instance, either of the two sites would on its own yield three or four years of housing allocation for Harrogate. Logically, this would require the council to suspend all other permissions for housing during this period. How realistic is this prospect? Past experience suggests the prospects are very slim and this would inevitably result in the sort of over-allocation of housing development that plagued Harrogate during the last planning period and about which the council, for much of period, was in a state of denial.

Perhaps the most important question of all is the ability of Harrogate Council to guarantee that large new greenfield housing sites will have all the facilities and infrastructure they need to be sustainable. The planning inspector has asked the council to prove that these large new sites can be both sustainable and delivered on time with all the necessary services and infrastructure.