A "love thy neighbour" scheme is being drawn up by Bradford Council to bring harmony to the city's estates.

It involves new tenants having get-to-know-you chats over cups of tea with their potential new neighbours.

When the Council allocated homes to new tenants in a particular street, the new tenants would be asked if they thought they would get on with neighbours before they got the keys to their new home.

Existing tenants would meet them to tell them about life on the estate.

And community groups would be involved to help the new families settle in.

The innovative scheme - likely to be piloted on the Ravenscliffe and Greengates estates - could spread throughout the district to help rebuild community spirit.

The project would end the impersonal letting schemes where people's details come up on a computer and they are allocated a home if possible on the estate they prefer.

Chairman of the housing services sub-committee Councillor Jim O'Neill says the newcomers often finished up in isolation with neighbours they did not know. He said: "We feel this would bring about a good community spirit and families would not feel isolated. We would like to get people to meet each other and sit down with a cup of coffee and talk about being new neighbours."

Councillor O'Neill said they did not intend to vet people and get applicants with suitable interests together, but thought the impersonal system where people were simply given a house should end.

Shipley North Area Housing Manager Ian Doncaster said the Council would be a forerunner of the scheme which will go to the sub committee shortly.

"We hope for a short timescale. Ravenscliffe has come a long way in the past year and this will be another step forward."

The plan follows a pioneering scheme launched by Manningham Housing Association where tenants must sign up a "good neighbour charter" before they move into their homes.

The association hopes the scheme - which is the first of its kind in Britain - will create the old fashioned community spirit which is missing on many estates.

The Ravernscliffe area is one of five estates being regenerated with cash from the Government's Single Regeneration Budget and many projects are being set up to improve it.

But Audrey Raistrick, secretary of Ravenscliffe and Greengates Residents' Association said: "How can people decide whether they want to be neighbours over a cup of tea? People can be quite different when you really get to know them."

And June Boocock, secretary of the Owlet Estate tenants and residents in Shipley, said that the scheme would not work. "You can't really get to know someone properly just by sitting down and having a cup of tea with them," she said, "They might look and seem OK but they could turn out to be the neighbours from hell."

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