Storms stir up talks on environment

Storms Ciara and Dennis have passed overhead and it appears our town and villages have emerged relatively unscathed in the aftermath.

As we saw over the weekend, the River Wharfe was well above its normal levels, which leads nicely on to some more work that the other Ward members and I have been working on.

Sadly, the Wharfe and its flood water doesn’t just contain plain water.

There are lots of nasties and other unmentionables contained in it, which is why the clean-up after a flooding event can take so long.

Early in February, Councillor’s Harrington, Richards and I met with high-level representatives from among others, Yorkshire Water, the Environment Agency, Beneath British Waters and Ilkley Clean Rivers Group.

We held a summit at Civic Hall to look at levels of sewage in the river.

You may recall that in November, Beneath British Waters gave an excellent deputation to all Leeds City Councillors.

This is a key issue but irrespective of what the Council plans to do, we as your ward members pledged to bring this up through the Scrutiny Board function at the council and also work with external agencies

to look at delivering a solution.

At our meeting, we wanted to find out from the appropriate agencies why there is sewage in the water, what the environmental regulations say about it and what can be done to prevent more pollution entering our watercourses.

I’m sure all would agree that overall this was a positive meeting as a first step.

Yes, we had robust discussions, and yes, this was only the first meeting, but a

number of us are now going to look in more detail at the treatment infrastructure.

We will be having further sessions with this group to look at how to tackle pollution in the Wharfe.

Initially, I want to focus on our area, but I recognise water pollution is a problem much bigger than just Wetherby.

As such, we need to engage with regional and national bodies such as the EA and Yorkshire Water.

Ultimately it is these bodies who are accountable and responsible for water quality.

They need to be held to account to make sure the current regulations are implemented, but more importantly, we need to get appropriate legislation in place to keep pollutants out of our rivers.

I will look to get our local MP involved at the appropriate time to look at the national picture.

On another matter, last week we heard that the planning appeal to build 210 houses on Stockeld Park right on the border with Wetherby had been refused by a Planning Inspector.

I have said before that I am not against all new housing, but what we need are smaller dwellings for growing families to start out with and older residents to downsize into - constantly building four and five bedroom homes is not sustainable development.

Thank you to all who got involved with the fight against the Stockeld application – we won this battle, but there will be many more to come to prevent over-development in Wetherby. Onwards!