The closure of Ilkley’s tip at the end of March 2024 was a sad event. It was also surprising given that all parties on the council cited the environment as being a key issue - yet the closure of the tip will add a significant number of miles driven per year as users now have to travel to other locations. Let’s take a quick, hypothetical look at what the impact may be.

It’s a pretty simple calculation; take the number of households that were using the tip, the number of times per year they used the tip, and the number of extra miles driven per trip.

Number of households: The Ilkley Ward has around 6,736 residences (https://ubd.bradford.gov.uk/media/1719/ilkley.pdf). Users of the tip included those in Addingham, Burley in Wharfedale, and Menston, but to keep the miles driven calculation simple let’s just focus on Ilkey and use the number of 6,500 households to keep the maths easy.

Uses per year: Difficult to estimate. In our household we used the tip around 5-10 times per year, but made multiple trips each time we did. Some will use it more often, some less. To make sure we don’t overestimate, let’s use the figure of 10 trips per household per year.

Extra miles driven: Both Keighley and Bingley tips are around 10 miles from the centre of Ilkley. I’ll use Keighley as going to Bingley would mean going over lots of road humps - not something I’d want to do in a heavily laden vehicle. I’ll assume here that there will be roughly the same number of journeys from the West side of Ilkley (so a shorter journey) as there are from the East side (a longer journey). So that would be a 20 mile round trip from the centre of Ilkley.

Using these fairly conservative estimates that gives:

6,500 households * 10 trips per year * 20 miles roundtrip = 

1,300,000 (1.3 million) extra miles

What about the cost ? If we use HMRC’s recommended per mile cost of 45p, that gives £585,000 that has been added to residents yearly costs. The actual figure will likely be higher as there are significantly more than 6,500 households affected.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowances-travel-mileage-and-fuel-allowances/travel-mileage-and-fuel-rates-and-allowances