Villagers in Denholme have a last chance to comment on a proposed waste tip next week.

A special neighbourhood forum is being held in the Mechanics Institute on Thursday, January 14, starting at 7.30pm. It will give residents the chance to ask questions about the planned tip at Buck Park.

Humberside consortium Wastewise has applied for outline planning permission to convert the quarry into a tip with a capacity for 2.4 million cubic metres of waste. This week a Wastewise official said he was confident his firm could provide a 'safe and well engineered' tip.

The public meeting will be attended by Marianne Milward, from Bradford council's planning department, who will outline the current situation. Members of Denholme town council will also be at the meeting to gauge the opinions of local residents. They will then announce whether they are supporting or opposing the application at the January town council meeting. Bradford council has the final say.

A party of town councillors has already visited two sites run by Wastewise and has reported favourably on the standard of operations.

Denholme mayor Cllr Russell Driver says: "I have been in favour of the application since the start because the sooner we get the thing filled in the better. Once it has been filled in, it is one less headache which we as a village have to deal with.

"When we have talked to Wastewise about the plans they seem on the ball and are prepared to come and listen to us and take things on board.

"We are very mindful of the public opinion in the village. That is why we have got the public meeting, so people can speak for and against it. We are actually trying to get the best conditions on-site and we will continue to strive for that."

Members of the public have voiced concerns about a potential increase in heavy traffic on the main A629 through the village and possible problems of insect infestations and nasty smells.

At previous public meetings Tory Bradford councillors Margaret Eaton and Simon Cooke have both said they have no confidence in Labour-run Bradford council's ability to police a waste site of this size.

Simon Jones, of Wastewise, will also be attending the meeting and answering questions from the public. Alongside other representatives from Wastewise, he has already held two presentations for residents in the Mechanics Institute.

He says: "We would like a decision on this soon because we have invested a lot of money in this application. We are confident that we can provide a safe and well engineered waste site at Buck Park."

Wastewise had a recent application for a waste site at North Cave, west of Hull, turned down. Mr Jones adds: "Hull is in a similar situation to Bradford in that it is rapidly running out of suitable waste sites, so we have a proposal to engineer a site to provide that capability."

The application is likely to come before Bradford council's Shipley planning sub-committee in February.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.