A public inquiry over a £20 million plan to build houses on Ilkley's former Middleton Hospital site has been postponed from next month to the New Year, a planning consultant has revealed.

But an objector said the issue had been thrown into confusion by developer Clay's of Addingham's submission of a new planning application.

The new application includes a reduction of the number of houses from 103 to 78, more in accordance with the original planning brief drawn up by Harrogate Council officers.

Council planners have now withdrawn the planning brief which envisaged a 'Dales' type village on the site. The land is owned by the Durham-based National Health Service Executive.

The new scheme is due to go before Harrogate Planning Committee next month and consultants for Clays hope an agreement with local authority planners can be reached to see it passed.

In a report to the joint advisory committee of the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), planning consultant Andrew Rollinson says: "Although the Council has cancelled the previously-approved strategy, the applicants and their advisors consider that much of its content was agreed over a long period of negotiation and that it is still very valid to the assessment of this current proposal."

Because the original planning application contained far more houses than the 80 in the planning brief, members of Harrogate's planning committee said they were minded to reject it.

Protestor Griet Terpstra, of Valley Drive, Ilkley, said the site had become a haven for rare wildlife in the years since the hospital closed and the bulldozers moved in. And she felt the new plan would cause as much damage as the first. "It is a reduction in the number of houses but it does not give a reduction in any of the problems," she said.

Fears about increased traffic on the A65 trunk road have led Department of Transport officials to call in the plan for a detailed examination.

There are also concerns about the visual impact of a housing development seen from the other side of the Wharfe Valley and its impact on the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Planning consultant Clive Brook said the planned public inquiry into the development had now been put back until the New Year but developers were hoping to come to an arrangement with planning officials before then.

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