A SILSDEN councillor has called for a ‘big picture’ study of the beck below the town to avoid future floods.

Councillor Adrian Naylor warns that extra water run-off caused by several hundred proposed houses could put unmanageable pressure on the narrow waterway.

He wants Bradford Council planners to ‘model’ the effects of the entire run-off from several expected new housing estates rather than looking at the projects one at a time.

Cllr Naylor, who serves on both Silsden and Bradford councils, made the comments in the light of current repairs to a collapsed bridge over Silsden Beck.

The bridge and the adjoining Keighley Road wall was damaged as water surged down the back during the Boxing Day 2015 floods.

Marsel Display Solutions is reconstructing the bridge, but nearby resident Ian Boulton fears it will cause heavy rain to spill out onto the road and flood his house.

Cllr Naylor warned there could be need for more wide-ranging work to avoid the beck flooding, as a result of several house-building projects on both sides of Keighley Road that are in various stages of planning.

Cllr Naylor said rainwater currently seeped into fields, so when housing estates were built on those fields developers had to install measures to take the water away safely.

He said that blueprints for some of these developments involved channelling the run-off into Silsden Beck so could flow down to the River Aire.

He says: “We need to know that water for any large-scale development will feed into the beck at the right place and not overflow onto the road and flood homes.

“A strategic view needs to be taken into account. There could be 600 or 700 houses, with all the potential run-off from building on green fields.

“All of this water will be spilling into the small beck and we know that at peak times it’s already full to capacity.

“The beck is at its narrowest point in the section from Aldi down to the river. There’s an existing bottleneck at Belton Road where the water is channelled under the road.

“The cumulative effect of all these houses could be disastrous. All this has to be modelled so we know the water can be dealt with.

“You can’t afford to see the water rise any further – you often drive past it in heavy rain and you can see the water as high as the fields.”