HAMBLETON councillors have insisted that road safety concerns must be addressed if a £1.4m scheme to replace a row of eyesore cottages with 25 new homes in Leeming Bar is finally to be supported.

The district council has been working with the Leeds-based Chevin Housing Group on plans to demolish seven houses in Northallerton Road and use the site, as well as an adjoining paddock, for a new development incorporating as many environmentally-friendly features as possible to reduce household waste and costs.

Hambleton is contributing £530,000 to the scheme, with another £901,000 coming from the Housing Corporation. Just over half of the proposed properties will be available at what are considered affordable rents to meet a local need.

Parish councillors and local people have complained for years that the cottages - many described by health officers as unfit for habitation - bring an air of dereliction to a main village entrance.

Hambleton development control committee agreed on Wednesday that the development should be conditionally supported subject to more investigations by the highway authority into road and pedestrian safety on the busy A684 to and from the Dales.

Concerns were expressed about children from the new houses having to find their way across the road to the village school 300yds away through a busy junction, where a mini roundabout was installed last year in connection with the expansion of the local industrial estate.

Coun John Coulson said Hambleton should ask the developer for a commuted sum to pay for some kind of crossing point. Head of development control Maurice Cann said road safety issues would be raised with the highways department, but if improvements were not considered necessary, Hambleton was in no position to apply pressure.

Planning officer Lydia Spiller, who recommended conditional approval, said consultations with the developer would cover such issues as drainage, financial contributions to public open space on and off the site and responsibility for landscaped areas on the new estate.

Responding to parish council concerns, she said the A684 frontage would have a hedge and fencing, with no allowance for gates, to make residents use allocated car parking spaces on the site instead of leaving vehicles on the main road.

Security on the northern edge of the site, bordering the line brought back into use by Wensleydale Railway in 2003, would also be an important consideration.

Mrs Spiller said the developer had undertaken detailed investigations into the possible effects on the new estate of noise from RAF Leeming and the presence of the rebuilt Vale of Mowbray factory on the other side of the railway.