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.

No-one seemed to talk about the actual problem here being the individuals who would have no qualms about fly tipping. What had gone so bad in their lives that they could, so casually, dump rubbish “onto land that does not have a licence to accept it”? They were at fault. Not Bradford Council. And while there is an obvious correlation between the closure of a tip and an increase in fly-tipping, it shouldn’t be the case. There are always going to be unprincipled folk who don’t follow societal norms. The good news is they’re a minority. Most people, it’s assumed, simply made and make the journey into Keighley when needs must.

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A year and bit since it was revealed that Bradford Council had approved to put Golden Butts up for sale, along with Ford Hill and Sugden End – ”this disposal of these sites is considered critical in line with the council’s medium term financial, strategy” – it seems that there is finally some end in sight for the waste and recycling centre on Golden Butts road, though not perhaps quite the outcome that many in the town would have.

We have been told that a sale could potentially go ahead this month. What exactly this will result in isn’t clear, as numerous offers for numerous reasons have been made for either one of both of the lots on the site (one relates to the now former waste and recycling centre, the other to little mentioned Ilkley Abattoir, which we believe is still occupied by Rowland Agar).

The council told us that one proposal for lot one, which comes with a guided price of £350,000, is for the abattoir to continue being used in its current state, with four other interested parties seeking to acquire the site for – in, we assume, the opaque parlance of “negotiations ongoing so we can’t say much” – “potential investment, redevelopment or owner-occupation”.

As for offers for both lot one and lot two bundled together – the latter being the 0.86-acre Golden Butts household waste and recycling centre, which has no publicly facing price attached to it that we can see of (although Ford Hill, with 1.04 acres, had a reported price tag of £750,000) but with an estimated rateable value of £19,000 – all bidders (number not disclosed) are “looking at it from a redevelopment perspective, including housing and retirement living”.

In response to how much Bradford Council expects to get for the site, we were given a very long answer that can be summed up as “negotiations and sale processes are currently ongoing” and, accordingly, while there is “public interest in facilitating accountability and transparency in how public funds and council assets/properties are managed”, it’s sensible to keep this under wraps for now. Which is fair enough.

However, what can be revealed is that the council says that it has achieved its saving target of £900,000 – and indefinitely so. We say indefinitely as had the three sites remained open, then the council would have continued incurring what were now seen as unsustainable costs, which were attributed to staff, site maintenance and haulage. For what has been described as an underused and superfluous asset – Bradford Council said back in 2024 that research by WRAP showed that the district had “an unusually high number of HWRCs” – this wouldn’t have made sense.

Against the backdrop of the council continuing to experience “severe financial challenges” – again by no means the exception here, but still among an unenviable number of local authorities in England that are have “big money problems” – with the BBC’s Shared Data Unit revealing that the council’s debt rose by more than £132 million in the past year and Bradford explaining that it spent £80 million more than was available for 2023/34 alone and that it may still need to borrow a total of £573 million as part of its plan to achieve financial sustainability by 2029/30 (which also requires it to achieve savings of around £50 million a year leading up to it), the closure of Ilkley Tip shouldn’t really be viewed in isolation.

Its discontinuation is one part of a wider diminution of community life and a scaling back of local government’s purview and impact on, in particular, non-statutory (aka discretionary) services. There’s a lot that has been lost, jettisoned, retired and whittled down across the district since 2010.

For instance, Rhodesway Swimming Pool, one of the first casualties of Conservative-intiated central government cuts (it closed its doors in 2011) was sold last year. Activity at the Ingleborough Hall Outdoor Education Centre was wrapped up with the property earmarked for “disposal” – also in 2024. Likewise, around 10 council-run libraries saw their opening hours cut by six hours a week in 2024.

It’s set to continue, of course. As the council has noted, difficult decisions still have to be made: “What we gain from the 2025-26 government settlement doesn’t solve the continuing escalating costs in adult and children’s social care. Even after we allow for the additional funding, we still have a budget gap and we still have to progress with our difficult and challenging proposed savings plans.”

While it may feel like Bradford Council is an outlier in the severity of its approach to tackling its aggravating finances, it’s not alone. The council is one of many making unpalatable decisions up and down the country. The closure of Ilkley Tip is part of a wider and concerning national trend, with communities up and down the UK, as the BBC reported in the summer, “paying for spiralling levels of council borrowing with a fire sale of publicly owned facilities”.

“Schools, care homes, a boxing gym and even an Olympic legacy equestrian centre are among hundreds of buildings being sold as struggling councils seek to reduce a debt pile totalling £122 billion,” the BBC Shared Data Unit said back in August. “Usually, authorities are not allowed to sell off assets in order to fund day-to-day services such as bin collections or social care. But increasing numbers of councils in financial trouble are now being given powers to do so by the government.”

And, given what is a gargantuan task to rectify, it seems that the only real way out of it, aside from the proposals being worked out by the Labour government to reform the way local government is funded having a dramatic but still limited impact – which includes better recognising deprivation in the “assessment of need” of councils and “resetting the business rates retention system”) – is through radical politics. There needs to be a reset of sorts – one suggestion is for debts to be written off – otherwise, what are we left with? A plan for devolution with councils like Bradford still hamstrung by their debt with no real end in sight? That’s not good enough. Not in an economically stagnant era like this. Send it to the tip.