Bradford Council’s proposal to replace the Richard Dunn sports centre at Odsal provides a perfect opportunity to test how serious it is about using brownfield sites for new housing before it starts bricking over the green belt.

Under the now-defunct Odsal Sporting Village plan, it was proposed that the Richard Dunn centre would be demolished and new sports facilities incorporated into the new stadium site on the opposite side of Rooley Avenue.

With the Council having pulled its proposed £15 million funding out of the project and the economic situation showing no signs of improving quickly, it is likely that the Sporting Village will not emerge on anything like the scale envisaged for many years to come.

But the Council still owns the land and it could easily choose to develop the community sports facilities and 25m swimming pool it originally proposed next to the stadium, to be incorporated into the Sporting Village if it gets off the ground in the future.

Developing the land in this way would also alleviate many of the problems posed by the former waste tip, with much of it becoming parking spaces, and it might even be possible to utilise the methane emissions from the tip for heating the swimming pool. Methane is used to heat homes in many cities around the world and it has the huge advantages of being odourless and of producing less carbon dioxide than other hydrocarbon fuels.

Such a move would create on the current sports centre site one of the most perfect potential sites for hundreds of affordable homes anywhere in the Bradford district.

If the Council doesn’t grasp this opportunity it will be very hard to convince Council taxpayers that it is not determined to ride roughshod over genuine green belt concerns.