On October 30th last year, the Village Hall was packed with villagers to hear representatives of Avant Homes talk about their revised plans for sixty homes near the Moor Road, Knaresborough Road junction in the centre of Bishop Monkton. At the meeting, the company made public promises to engage with the village to discuss concerns about the scheme, notably issues with road safety and with drainage infrastructure. However, three and a half months later, nothing has happened. 'Bishop Monkton Today' has tried to find out why.

The deadline for comments on the revised planning application for the site was November 22nd. The original target date for NYC Planners to make a recommendation on the application was in mid-January. Neither of these deadlines has been met. The hold-up appears to be that two key public bodies who are required to make comments have failed to do so and the Council has not apparently chased them up. The two bodies involved are the lead flood authority and the highways department of the Council itself. Clearly, given the nature of the main concerns about the scheme - flooding and road safety - the comments of these consultees are crucial.

We understand that the planning officer handling this appliction hs been off work for a while but is now back at work.

We asked North Yorkshire Council to answer these questions-

North Yorkshire Council’s Head of Development Management, Martin Grainger, said: “A date has yet to be set for when the application will be considered by the planning committee. Only once all consultation responses have been received and assessed along with the large number of local representations made about the proposed development will a recommendation be made by officers. Once a date has been set for committee, all parties who made representations will be notified."

An Avant Homes spokesperson said: “We have held no further formal discussions regarding the pending planning application for our proposed development in Bishop Monkton since our meeting with residents in October. We are currently awaiting the final outstanding consultation responses from key consultees, before being in a position to progress discussions with all relevant parties. We remain fully committed to working with North Yorkshire Council, Yorkshire Water and Bishop Monkton residents to further consider the concerns raised during October’s consultation meeting.”

The Parish Council is due to discuss the Avant application at its regular monthly meeting this coming Tuesday.

For our original report on the October 30th public meeting click here

If you have a view on this, please email us.