LETTERS: Granny Lane, Mirfield - housing development decision regrettable but predictable

Michael Hutchinson writes: My sympathies lie with the local residents who opposed housing on the Granny Lane “water meadow”. The planning inspector’s decision to allow development there is regrettable, although it was predictable.

In the previous Local Plan the Government inspector accepted my proposal to add the Granny Lane site to both the area of high landscape value and the green belt.

This was based on the landscape unity of the gently sloping valley bottom and the adjacent steep, wooded slopes. It made building there highly unlikely.

In the latest plan the green belt allocation for this site was removed and the high value landscape designation is totally missing. This opened the door for house building both at Granny Lane and south-east of Mirfield.

The traffic from the latter, in particular, threatens to overwhelm our town. It looks as though Mirfield’s Tory councillors were asleep on the job or ineffective when these changes were made.

House-building off Granny Lane is not the first Tory failure of this kind in Mirfield.

They have often courted cheap publicity by aligning themselves with protesters. Typically they have then failed to stop development, no matter how undesirable.