North Yorks greenlights £10m Whitby Maritime Hub
Also finding favour with the local authority was Banks Property’s 224-home Castle Hill West project in Harrogate.
North Yorkshire Council’s strategic planning committee met on Tuesday for a marathon session, which including breaks stretched out to more than five hours.
Also in the spotlight were two solar projects and reserved matters for a converter linked to the now-approved Peterhead-Drax subsea cable.
The £10m hub project’s aim is to provide training and certification opportunities in the maritime, marine and offshore industries, to residents of Whitby and the wider area.
Following consultation, which won 69% support locally, plans were lodged in April for the public sector-led project.
Enjoy Design is the architect and nineteen47 the planner. Willmott Dixon is lined up as contractor. The project is fully supported by Town Deal funds.
Banks, the County Durham-headquartered property group, wants to deliver 224 homes on its 31-acre site off Whinney Lane, Pannal Ash, to the south-west of Harrogate – 40% of homes in the scheme will be affordable.
The project also includes a new primary school, and was unanimously approved.
The proposals for the site, which was allocated for residential development in the Harrogate Local Plan, were recommended for approval from NYC’s planning officers.
Banks’ site is located directly opposite the Castle Hill Farm residential development, for which Banks Property received planning permission in 2018 and which was subsequently built out by a regional housebuilder.
Gillian Reed, senior development manager at the Banks Group, said: “We worked with local community groups for a number of years, we’ve listened and we have provided reassurance about how development will work.”
The development will also make substantial contributions to the expansion and improvement of local secondary education, healthcare and sports facilities, as well as transport infrastructure, a point that won praise from a committee member.
Reed continued: “The new government has stressed the importance of increasing the UK’s supply of high-quality homes, both to ensure people have the housing options they need in the places they want to live and to support the wider UK economy’s future growth, and the Castle Hill West site will now be part of meeting both these objectives.
“We’re very grateful to all those who have backed our plans and will now look to move them forward as quickly as we can.”
Touching on the same theme from a different perspective, one committee member mused that with the Labour government hiking housing targets, “we’re in a very hard place if we don’t approve projects like this”.
The Whitby Maritime Hub’s reference on the North Yorkshire planning portal is ZF24/00491/RG3, and the Banks project documents can be found at 20/01706/EIAMAJ.
