Residents should be aware that the resurrection of York's draft Local Plan is imminent, with the first in a series of regular meetings of the council's newly constituted Local Plan Working Group set to take place on 29 September.

It will concentrate on two critical issues underpinning the plan: the downwardly revised nationally produced figure of housing need for York, and the flattening trends in economic growth.

It is to be hoped that this time around political aspiration will give way to resident realism, and any figures agreed will be concentrate on resolving the city's desperate housing need. Hopefully there will be less emphasis on embellishing the figures using unhelpful 'backlog', 'buffer' and other devices to inflate them unnecessarily.

A revised Local Plan will be circulated for another citywide consultation in the New Year when I hope there will be more listening to responses than occurred last time.

In the meantime any resident has the right to attend the Working Party and put a point of view, as I have done in the past. Exercising your democratic right should thwart previous attempts to swell the figures so as to justify an attack on York's Greenbelt, and should result in the adoption of a brownfield sites first policy for the development of our special heritage city.

Allan Charlesworth Old Earswick