YORK’S Local Plan will include controversial “safeguarded” land set aside for building in future years, despite a legal row between City of York Council and opponents of the scheme.

Members of the influential Local Plan working group voted by six to five to push ahead with the plan to include sites currently in the greenbelt to be built on after the lifetime of the 15-year plan.

The same meeting on Thursdaynight also saw the council’s top planning officials publicly warn councillors a fresh plan of sites to be included in the Local Plan is not likely to get to a full council meeting before May’s elections, meaning a new administration could choose to radically redraw the proposals.

And officials also said that new figures from the Office of National Statistics, due to be published within the next three weeks, could drastically change the population projections, meaning the figures for future housing demand could change significantly.

Committee members saw legal advice from planning barrister John Hobson, which said without safeguarded land, York’s Local Plan would likely be branded “unsound” and rejected by a Government inspector.

But campaigners Allan Charlesworth and Tony Fisher challenged that opinion, saying legal advice from their own barrister argued that the council’s plans did not follow national planning law, and safeguarding land would just encourage developers to bring their schemes for greenbelt land forward sooner.

York Outer MP Julian Sturdy echoed these points, and said local councils categorically did not need to safeguard development sites like this.

But the council’s planning bosses Martin Grainger and Sarah Tanburn said that while it was true that law did not demand safeguarded sites in Local Plans, York’s unique position in having no land which was not either in the greenbelt, or in an urban area, meant they had little choice but to safeguard land in order to protect the rest of the greenbelt in the future.

Two village design statements, from Strensall with Towthorpe and Wheldrake, were approved by the committee as councillors and officials alike thanked the local volunteers who had compiled the documents.