A FORMER Mayor of Ripon is planning to re-form an action group in a bid to fight-off a planned green belt town for 25,000 people.

Councillor Rowley Simpson said it was madness to plan a town of such size between Ripon and Thirsk on some of the country's top agricultural land.

The controversial proposals emerged from the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Planning Conference who engaged London planning experts to suggest sites for housing needs into the next Millennium.

Coun Simpson praised the press for revealing plans to the public and said he would fight them. They are part of a wider scheme to build 417,000 homes throughout Yorkshire to meet the area's housing needs up to the year 2016.

"The public had a right to know that this idea was being put forward," said Coun Simpson, a Ripon City Councillor and former Harrogate District councillor.

He is now planning to restart the Rescue Ripon Group which successfully fought-off a council plan to route an inner relief road through the heart of Ripon.

He said the group had dormant funds available and these could be used top help fight the proposal of 'dumping' a new town on their doorstep. Coun Simpson said the area's infrastructure would not be able to cope with an additional 25,000 people so close.

"Towns are not just created overnight. They grow and develop with facilities. Rescue Ripon was a non-political group which stopped our city being cut in two and I shall be speaking to a former official in a bid to restart it," said Coun Simpson who has twice been Mayor of Ripon.

Meanwhile, Councillor Chris Brown, whose Wathvale ward on Harrogate Council has been targeted for the new town, said local people were hopping mad at the new plans. Some have expressed their anger that they were not consulted, even though the new town plan is only a proposal. Some locals are angry that the idea was hatched late last year but had been kept under wraps until the story was broken by the press on Tuesday.

Vale of York Tory MP Anne McIntosh, who has already attacked the plans, said she was pressing for the building of affordable homes in brownfield sites, equipped with adequate transport infrastructure. "We must unite against these proposed excesses from developers and planners," she said.

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