From Keighley News 2 November 2020

The long-awaited new railway station car park won’t now be completed until early 2022, it has been revealed.

And the much-delayed scheme is set to cost over £750,000 more than forecast.

The hammer-blow is contained in a report due to go before West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s investment committee on Thursday (Nov 5).

Plans for the desperately-needed new multi-storey car park at Steeton & Silsden railway station have been plagued by problems.

Originally the scheme was scheduled for completion last month.

But a new legal agreement with the Department for Transport had to be worked out when Northern, which had responsibility for the station, was sacked as rail franchisee.

Funding for the project – which will see a three-storey car park built on the site of the existing one, creating an extra 104 places – was approved a year ago.

However, Thursday’s meeting will hear that the budget has soared from £3,879,000 to £4,630,800.

The committee will be asked to back the extra funding and an extension to the timescale, plus give similar approval for schemes at two Wakefield stations.

The report says: “It has been identified that the value of the contracts – and therefore the total scheme costs approval – needs to be increased to reflect the VAT element that cannot be recovered by Northern or the combined authority under current HMRC rules.

“Our ‘park and ride’ programme has sufficient funds to meet these additional costs and will still have contingency funding for other schemes.”

Craven ward councillor Adrian Naylor has voiced his disappointment at the latest delays.

He said: “They were due to start on the site a few weeks before lockdown then Grant Shapps removed the franchise from Northern. The Department for Transport took over and it had to look at re-doing the contracts.

“Nothing happened during the period of lockdown, which would have been the ideal time for work to start – as concerns over cars being displaced was one of the main issues with this work. It looks like a whole year will have been wasted, at a time when hardly anyone was using the car park and the work would have had little impact on the people of Steeton. Now work will probably start after Christmas when we’ll see an increase in people travelling.”

Concerns are shared by Councillor David Mullen, chairman of Steeton-with-Eastburn Parish Council.

He said: “This has been going on for far too long, it’s ridiculous. They need to stop messing about and get on with it now.”

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