In the Referendum on 2nd July, the electorate of Guisborough Parish (which includes Dunsdale, Upleatham, Newton under Roseberry and Hutton Village) overwhelmingly voted ‘YES’ to approve our Neighbourhood Plan (NP). The results were Yes – 2850, No – 155, Void – 4, total – 3,009 votes (20.59% of registered voters). For over 3 years, Guisborough Town Council (GTC) have been collecting views, opinions, comments and information from our community through surveys, posters, Facebook posts, flyers, drop-in sessions and two 6-week formal consultation sessions. Sincere apologies if you didn’t see some of this, but GTC had no funding for the NP and a central government grant only paid for external professional planning advice.

A NP can legally only contain policies primarily about the use of land, so subjects such as NHS medical and dental services, and even traffic, could not be addressed. The NP does, however, have 3 policies to ensure that all future developments are fully appropriate for our community and its character, and are built to high standards to meet the needs of many decades to come. There are also 9 policies that give some of our iconic green spaces an appropriate level of protection. Two other green spaces, which had ongoing planning applications, were included to the extent possible, with further designations requested when allowable.

NPs are legal documents and therefore must be written using specialised wording, which unfortunately makes them challenging to read, but perhaps this article will make it a little clearer. It would have been published before the Referendum, but councils are forbidden from doing this for fear of influencing people’s votes. You can see our Guisborough NP and its supporting documents on Redcar & Cleveland’s website
https://www.redcar-cleveland.gov.uk/planning/neighbourhood-planning/guisborough-neighbourhood-area-planning.

Thanks to the awesome support of Guisborough parish, Redcar & Cleveland will take full account of our policies in their future planning decisions, so we have genuinely had our say!

Guisborough Town Council.