Three Daventry district villages vote in favour of adopting Neighbourhood Plan

Residents in Badby, Welton and Guilsborough visited the ballot boxes yesterday (January 24) to vote in a referendum on whether the plans should be enacted.

And the three villages all voted overwhelmingly in favour of the plans, which will help Daventry District Council determine future planning applications that are submitted in the villages.

In Badby, 90.22 per cent voted for the plans, with a turnout of 43 per cent, while in Guilsborough nearly half the residents voted in the referendum with a turnout of 49 per cent - with 229 residents (87.4 per cent) voting in favour. And in Welton a whopping 96.76 per cent of voters wanted the neighbourhood plan to be adopted, with a turnout of 48.71 per cent.

The respective plans set a series of guidelines and policies for which future housing proposals would be supported if they met the criteria. It also sets ‘village confines’, which act as boundaries for where potential housing would be welcomed or frowned upon. Most are separated between ‘built up’ areas and open countryside, with development encouraged to steer away from the open countryside.

In Guilsborough, for example, one policy reads: “The opportunity for the village to accommodate a limited degree of growth in order to prosper is welcomed. However, this must be weighed against the need to preserve its local distinctiveness, its role as a rural settlement which does not encroach unduly on the open countryside which surrounds it, and to acknowledge that it already suffers significant pressure from the higher-level services it provides for the wider area.”

And one of the main objectives of the Badby plan is to ‘ensure any future developments or new additions to existing properties within the parish respect and maintain its character, and are in keeping with the existing built environment’.