ONE of the victims of Ilkley's housing crisis has added her support to the building of new affordable homes for young people in the town.

Mum Sara Meekley and her partner, Sean Dowker, were forced to spend their nights on a sofa bed in the kitchen of Sarah's mother's house in Colbert Avenue, Ilkley, because they had no home of their own.

Last August, seven-months pregnant Ms Meekley, 21, told the Gazette that she was at her wit's end about the prospect of having to leave the town she and her partner were born and brought up in.

The desperate couple, unable to afford Ilkley's sky-high house prices or private rent, applied for a council house and were told they would have to move out of the area.

While expensive, executive-style houses were springing up like mushrooms around their ears, the couple were told by housing officers that they would have to wait for as long as eight years to get to the top of the housing list in Ilkley.

The couple also feared that if they moved far away the travelling distance might put Mr Dowker's job as a roofer in Addingham, in jeopardy.

But following the birth of their baby daughter, Maya, at Airedale Hospital Mr Dowker, 24, and Ms Meekley stayed on at Colbert Avenue, taking advantage of the extra room available while her mother was away, before they were granted a two-bedroom council flat off Langford Road, Burley-in-Wharfedale.

"Maya was born on October 5. We got a flat in February three-and-a-half months later. We were over the moon when we got it," said Ms Meekley.

Although the village of Burley is not the place where the couple had been brought up, they felt it was close enough to Ilkley to accept the offer of a £40-a-week flat. And it also kept them within the Ilkley education pyramid, which was an important consideration for when Maya gets old enough to start school.

"People have asked me why we didn't insist on Ilkley but we thought that Burley was near enough," said Ms Meekley.

She added that she welcomed the proposed construction of 12 affordable homes on the former International Wool Secretariat research and development site on Valley Drive, and would like to see more.

She said that she would have gladly applied to a housing association for one of the houses if they had been available earlier.

"When we were looking for a house I rang housing associations but the only homes within a ten-mile radius were for people over 65. The only ones that housed young people were in Leeds and Bradford," said Ms Meekley.

Since the story appeared in the Gazette last year, Ms Meekley said that people had stopped her in the street to offer support and comment on the lack of cheaper homes in Ilkley.

She said: "At the end of the day there are always going to be people like us - I am not the only girl in Ilkley that this has happened to."

Last month Shabir Mohammed, Bradford Council's housing association programme manager, called on residents to help him identify plots of land where more affordable homes could be built.

Mr Mohammed said that he had £440,000 to spend on affordable housing in the next five years and it was important that parish councillors were made aware of suitable sites.