The plan to build a new £1 million medical centre on the Rawdon Road car park site in Haworth, due to be considered by the Keighley Area Planning Panel on Thursday, is good news for the village.

First and foremost it will provide Haworth with modern facilities which are a great improvement on those it has at present. It is particularly good that the centre will have the resources to deal with outpatient work which would otherwise entail a journey to hospital.

A big bonus for Haworth, though, is that the purchase of the site by the developers will put paid to the wrangling over clamping on this particular site. There have been constant and regular complaints from aggrieved motorists of run-ins with the car park owner over his apparently over-zealous attitude to exercising his authority.

That has for some time been a blight on Haworth's reputation, with many people - including former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam - leaving the village with a bitter taste and a lighter wallet, vowing never to return and warning their friends and acquaintances to stay away.

That is the last thing a place with an economy largely dependent on the goodwill of visitors needs. Although the same person will continue to own the Changegate car park, the closure of Rawdon Road should ease the problem. However, such a tourism hot-spot also needs parking spaces. Eighty of those will be lost.

If Haworth is to thrive and generate jobs from the tourism culture it will have to fully replace those spaces and hopefully find imaginative ways of creating others elsewhere to cope with the village's future growth.