The people of Cross Roads are being urged to back the campaign for a Haworth parish council. Petition forms are going out to shops as a steering committee led by villager Smith Midgley tries to stir up support.

Spurred on by the numbers of Haworth signatures still coming in, the new committee is drawing up a boundary for the proposed new body. Mr Midgley says the most sensible boundary would match that of the old Haworth urban district council, which was swallowed up by Keighley borough in 1936 and included Cross Roads.

The hope is to put together a strong case for a parish council which would eventually have to go to the Boundary Commission.

Mr Midgley says: "I know parish councils haven't a lot of power but they have a little more clout than a voluntary organisation."

Meanwhile, Ilkley councillor Anne Hawkesworth has said that Keighley Area Panel, the council's local body, ought to promote the formation of a haworth parish council. She says a democratically elected parish council would give a stronger voice to the community than the neighbourhood-forum system of public meetings which Bradford council currently operates. She believes other villages, such as East Morton, would be equally suitable.

Cllr Hawkesworth, the Conservative spokesman on the area panel, claims that if her party was in power at Labour-dominated City Hall parish councils could be allocated funding to improve services.

Haworth resident Mary Ward, the local representative of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, was one of the few people who attended a public meeting last autumn to discuss the possibility of taking a campaign for a Haworth parish council forward.

She agrees that parish councils are one of the more effective ways of bringing local government to the grass roots. She sees the neighbourhood forum - part of Bradford's power-to-the-people set up - as a talking shop without structure or strategy.

and says that a parish councils emasculated by not raising rates could not be worse.

'It would bring together people who would contribute towards the community in a way which they don't at the moment,' she says.

Cllr Irene Ellison-Wood, chairman of Keighley area panel, says that judging by the relatively low interest in the Haworth parish council issue and the average attendance of 50 at village neighbourhood forum meetings it would appear that people support that system.

And she says suggestions of neighbourhood forum type meetings in some areas covered by parish councils are being considered.

'There will always be some people who say neighbourhood forums are a waste of time but perhaps they have not attended,' she comments.

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