With just five days to go to one of the most important public meetings in the village in recent years, we will be previewing Avant's plans for 60 homes in the village. Today, here is our brief summary of their plans. Over the weekend, we will publish BMAG's view on these plans and Avant's explanation of why they have called the meeting.

The lengthy application, comprising more than 60 documents, has been lodged with the Council, and can be viewed here

The final date for comments to the Council is Friday 15th November. Avant's presentation to villagers is in the VH on Wednesday 30th October at 7pm.

We have scanned these plans and briefly they show -

Overall it is a slightly scaled down version of the last version of their application (for 84 houses) withdrawn last summer.

It is for 60 houses, 36 for re-sale, 24 'affordable' (mainly Housing Association style rental). Of the 36, 12 are two- bed, 15 three-bed and 9 four-bed. Of the 24, 4 are one-bed, 10 two-bed, 8 three-bed and 2 four-bed.

The house designs, with 7 differing across those for sale (virtually all brick, a few 'stone') and 5 across the 'affordables' appear a little more imaginative that previous applications. A few even seem to have chimneys!

Virtually all have 2 off road parking slots.. A few also have a garage. There's a limited number of visitor parking slots (10 across the site).

The sewage outflows (all foul water, ie toilets, bath/showers, sink and washing machines etc) will join the main Hungate sewer at the X-roads. This sewer flows down past the L&F where it is joined by the St John's road sewer and out along Boroughbridge road to the Sewage Treatment Works. Avant make reference to Yorkshire Water stating that there is a small amount of spare capacity in the sewage syetem (debatable) and, in an Appendix D, refer to Yorkshire Water as effectively stating that it is all fine to drain foul water in to the Hungate sewer. The YW drainage plan referred to is still the one from 2011, which is out of date and incomplete, showing for example that most of the village sewers only contain foul water, whereas most are mixed/combined and also contain a considerable amount of surface water (which peaks in heavy rain). Greater effort has been directed towards measuring and understanding flows and manholes along Hungate. In this submission Avant have referred to the Inspector's report regarding his more recent approval of the Kebell Church Farm application, initially rejected partly because of the drainage issues.

Surface Water (from house roofs, gutters, ground, roads etc) will be collected into a large attenuation tank, situated pretty centrally on the site (different location than before). It will be discharged, in a controlled volume, by a new adjacent pumping station in to a new outflow pipe, which will be under the site entrance road, under Knaresborough road to the X-roads, under Hungate for its length, into St John's Road (by the L&F) and flowing out into the Beck by the bus stop.

Pavements and Access - the access directly to Moor Road is just for pedestrians (possibly cycles) with all else being directly from Knaresborougn Road.The is also a footpath to the south side, joining Knaresborough road by the boundary with the Old Vicarage. Apart from a stub on the Knaresborough road (from a crossing of some form, to the village side) there are no new pavements. This appears to be well short of a stipulated 'the provision of pedestrian footways along the site frontages to Knaresborough Road and Moor Road as well as a pedestrian crossing point on Knaresborough Road will be required'. Certainly no mention of Moor Road up to the A61.

The current hedging along Moor and Knaresborough Roads, containing the site, looks to have been broadly retained (bar entrances).

Green space in and around the site is more than in previous plans, with a central area around the attenuation tank, another on the north side as well as the easten boundary, larger on the western boundary and a 20m band on the southern boundary.