Senior councillors have passed a resolution they hope will protect land once earmarked for housing after the legality of a planning policy was called into question.

An emergency meeting of Bradford Council’s executive was called to try to put right a “genuine mistake” which could affect the future of six housing sites.

But as the issue has not been tested in court, the Council was merely “making the best of a bad job”, councillors were told.

It has recently emerged that there was an omission at a review of the Replacement Unitary Development plan in 2008 and major housing sites were not properly protected, as reported in the Telegraph & Argus.

But until recently the Council believed that the policy was enough to allocate the land for housing. A planning expert has now challenged the legal basis for saving unimplemented housing allocations, believing this policy only serves to protect the sites and does not allocate them for a specific use. The latest legal advice to the Council now agrees this is the case. The executive resolved that planners should give significant weight to the previous allocation of such sites when determining a planning application as it was not its intention to allow the unimplemented housing sites to lapse.

Councillor Ian Greenwood, leader of the Council, said this should now provide clarity over the past mistake but that any test of the legal advice would need to be in the courts. He said: “We are not determining any planning applications. This will be done by colleagues on a quasi-judicial basis at a planning panel. When colleagues make that decision we will defend that decision to the best of our ability.

“The only real test of the law is in court.”

Two applications which have been considered, but without a decision notice having been issued they will need to be reconsidered by the regulatory and appeals committee.

There are also three live applications, including schemes for 174 homes at Derry Hill and 125 homes at Bingley Road in Menston, which are affected by the land allocation blunder, as well as one appeal, over Sty Lane, near Micklethwaite, Bingley.