IN response to your article Party Poopers (September 25).

Towards the end of the article Coun Steve Galloway stated "the proposal to allocate housing to Green Belt land at Huntington only surfaced three years ago"; this is actually incorrect.

Without going into extensive detail, the land at Huntington was originally recommended for removal from the Green Belt by a Government inspector at the York Green Belt Local Plan in January 1994.

In July 1994 North Yorkshire County Council produced a report which recommended that the land should be excluded from the Green Belt, but eventually the council resolved not to adopt the plan. Its history can therefore be traced back to York's Green Belt Local Plan in the early 1990s.

The site subsequently appeared as a proposed allocation for housing in a third set of changes to the Draft Local Plan in February 2003 and, as mentioned in the article, was subsequently removed on the basis that housing numbers could be accommodated on the York Central site and, I have no doubt, on the back of an election pledge. Huntington is a Lib Dem stronghold.

While I wholly support the re-development of a large brownfield site in the centre of York, the proposal to accommodate up to 3,000 homes, one million square feet of office accommodation, and up to 200,000sq ft of ancillary retail and leisure uses at York Central is an astronomical density by any standards.

I believe the city council is in serious danger of leaving York short of strategic land within which to grow and prosper in the coming years.

I Hessay,

Managing Director,

Persimmon Homes (Yorkshire) Ltd,

Fulford, York.

Updated: 09:47 Friday, October 15, 2004