Petition to save North Yorkshire activity centre gathers pace
Bradford Council is considering closing Ingleborough Hall as it tries to balance its books
Almost 3,000 people have signed a petition to save activity centre in the Yorkshire Dales.
Ingleborough Hall welcomes hundreds of school children from across the region each year.
The petition was started by former Leeds headteacher Julia Britton who spent 22 years running trips there.
“It’s a beautiful old mansion house with vast grounds where children can run and play and get lost in the woods but yet there’s such a feeling of safety and security there,” she said.
“It’s truly a unique place.
“There’s 112 beds I think there are, and you can take schools, family groups, religious groups, music groups, children with special educational needs… they cater for absolutely everybody and they’re very inclusive.
“We always asked our year 6 children: ‘what was your favourite memory throughout school?’
“And bearing in mind we looked after them day after day for seven or eight years…and their favourite memory is their three-day residential to Ingleborough Hall out of everything that you’ve done. And that to me just speaks volumes about how special this place actually is.”
Bradford Council is proposing £40m worth of cuts in the next three years but has warned that might not be enough to prevent it from effectively declaring bankruptcy.
But Julia says the council needs to prioritise children and young people:
“The children are the most important people in all of this, they are the next generation.
“If you think about the children in Bradford, there are 39 per cent who are living in poverty.
“Taking away this resource is to the detriment of all of those children and we’re talking about children from all over Yorkshire and wider actually.”
Cllr Imran Khan, Bradford Council’s portfolio holder for education, employment and skills, said:
“No council wants to have to make cuts like this but when 87% of the Council’s projected spend this year is to be spent on social care for vulnerable children and adults, it leaves very little for other services. We have to make significant reductions in our budget. The proposal for Ingleborough Hall has been put forward after careful consideration.
“We have asked the government to provide more sustainable funding for councils but failing that, we have applied for exceptional financial support from Government so that we can set a budget. We need better and fairer funding arrangements for social care nationally.
“Closing Ingleborough Hall is one of a number of proposals which are currently out to public consultation and I would urge people to look at the proposals on our website and engage with the feedback.”