PLANNING chiefs at City of York Council have given the green light to a development on the former York Gasworks site, off Layerthorpe.

The scheme includes 97 one-bedroom and 61 two-bedroom flats, in six blocks. It also involves the extension of the James Street link road, from Layerthorpe to Heworth Green.

The road will run through the gasworks site as well as the former Foss Islands car park site, which is also being developed as a housing complex.

The contaminated site to the rear of the former Frog Hall pub has remained largely unused since the closure of the works in the 1960s.

Recommending the application, development control officer Roger Armistead said: "This is a good use of a long derelict riverside site, with easy access to the city centre."

Councillors were concerned that only 29 flats - 18.5 per cent of the development - were to be set aside for affordable housing.

But Derek Gauld, the council's principal city development planner, said the developer's commitment to affordable housing had been reduced because of the cost of decontaminating the site and the link road costs.

He said: "We concluded that the council's 25 to 50 per cent affordable housing target was irrelevant, given the site development costs."

Janet O'Neill, acting as an agent for Tiger Developments Ltd, said the decontamination costs had been hundreds of thousands of pounds more than expected prior to purchase of the site, because of a change in Environment Agency advice.

This also reduced the area of the site that could be built on.

The application was opposed by Heworth ward councillors Ruth Potter and Viv Kind. They claimed the area was becoming overdeveloped and that this site in particular would be overcrowded.

Coun Tracey Simpson-Laing raised concerns that the development did not provide any housing suitable for families.

Coun Dave Merrett, the Labour group leader, voted against the application.

He said: "The council should be applying its policies on housing-mix, rather than concentrating on buy-to-let applications, which offer housing beyond the means of many York residents."

Several conditions were attached to the application. These include:

Enhancing the trees shielding the road extension from the flats

Ensuring public access to the River Foss is retained to the rear of the site

Reconsidering the waste bin arrangements on site

Looking into measures to tap into sustainable energy sources in the complex.

Updated: 08:45 Thursday, May 25, 2006