What’s the latest on Ilkley Tip?

A meandering look at the status of the former waste and recycling centre on Golden Butts Road and Bradford Council’s finances

There was, as you’d expect in a small, reasonably well to do town like Ilkley, outrage when it was revealed that the household waste and recycling centre on Golden Butts Road, along with two other waste recycling sites in the district, were at risk of closure.

Ilkley Town Council described its demise as a blow to the whole town, as if a glorious, gilded era of accessible excess rubbish removal had tragically come to an end. The local MP, Robbie Moore, who has a penchant for hyperbole, launched a petition to “save our tips”, as if they were an endangered species at risk of imminent extinction. The “battle” is on, he said, his face deadly serious. It’s disgraceful, remarked one resident. Dump your rubbish at the council offices, said another. Hang your heads in shame chipped in someone else. And so on and so on.

Bradford Council, like many beleaguered councils in England, whose primary function these days – mission even – appears to be getting a grip on its dire finances (local government now, in effect, acting as an accounting firm rather than an economically functional and purposeful force for meaningful change at a community level), said that the closure of the tips was necessary.

It’s not our fault, the council has been keen to get across for quite some time now. Blame the Tory government for our predicament, our misfortunes, our deficiencies, we have been told. This is where 14 long years of deep and harmful cuts, which have diminished the council’s spending power, gets you. Sure, but Bradford Council’s questionable handling of its finances has also contributed to the situation they find themselves in.

At the start of 2024, the council said that it was committed to reducing spending on council services by £40 million within three years. It explained that the idea to shut down Ilkley Tip, one of many proposals to save money – including an increase in council tax (which has long been an inevitable annual increase in local taxation, with a hefty and unusual 9.99% rise this year, during a deep-set cost of living crisis no less, showing how desperate things are) and cuts in funding to libraries and leisure services – was down to “unprecedented levels of financial pressure” that it was experiencing.

And so it came to be that Ilkley Tip, along with Ford Hill in Queensbury and Sugden End in Keighley, ceased all operations in the spring of 2024. A year and half later, the doors to the household waste and recycling centre remain resolutely closed, with all hope of it being reopened in its previous form all but gone despite the best if not entirely unrealistic intentions of, respectively, Ilkley Town Council, the MP for Keighley and Ilkley and local campaigners (there was, for instance, talk of the town council running it at a cost to residents, but it was found that it would, in any case, be beyond its limited statutory remit).

Though there was disappointment and an unwillingness to concede defeat in the months that followed, Ilkley, not surprisingly, adjusted to the new, tipl-less world that had been forced on it. It wasn’t difficult and it wasn’t catastrophic. In fact, it was relatively painless. You see, the tip was never an indispensable part of the town. It was always a nice to have. It was never the case that a trip to the tip was a daily, weekly or even monthly fixture in people’s lives. We went when we needed to, whether it was for those occasions when we had an above average increase in waste or when we decided, on a whim perhaps, that we were long overdue clear out. Meaning every now and again.

Bradford Council pointed to this fact in a roundabout way, stating that Golden Butts was among the least used centres in the district. And even then, if it was a regular feature in one’s life, then surely this warranted some sort of self reflection that interrogated why we were generating so much rubbish that we couldn’t fit it into the many bins we have lined up outside of our homes. The problem wasn’t the tip closing, the problem was the waste you generated.

The surrounding countryside also survived the closure of the tip. There were, expectedly, fears of an increase in fly tipping. This never materialised. It was a predictable argument, lazy even, that X action would lead to Y outcome because of Z proposal. It was argued that the journey to the next nearest tip would be too much of a burden and that faced with what is certainly an inconvenient but still very short 25 or so minute ish trip from the centre of town, residents would seek an easy way out and dump their rubbish anywhere but a designated and dedicated waste and recycling facility.