12 October 2021

KCC COUNCILLOR'S REPORT 

HIGHSTED PARK

Since late July the topic that has generated more mails than any other has been regarding a speculative planning application known to most as Highsted Park. It’s understandable that so many residents in Swale East are concerned by this enormous application. If it goes ahead it would more than double the number of households in the Swale East KCC division, and would change the character of many of the villages in the West Downs and Teynham & Lynsted wards beyond recognition.

I think there are a few important reasons why this application should not go ahead. First and foremost is that the people of Swale East simply do not want it. Back in 2019, the previous administration at Swale Borough Council was going through the early stages of revising their 2017 Bearing Fruits local plan. They had put forward the idea of ‘Garden Villages’ and in March of that year it appeared that the council’s leader had given his backing to the scheme at Highsted Park. In the local elections just a few weeks later, the Conservative run council were dramatically voted out of power.

The concerns which have been most frequently cited in objections to the application include:-

The lack of GP provision – Swale was widely reported as having the worst GP to patient ratio in the country a couple of years ago and the problem is one of a failure to recruit new staff, so not necessarily fixable by the building of a new medical centre.

Traffic along the A2 and Air Quality – although the crux of this proposal is the building of a ‘relief road’ to reduce traffic through Sittingbourne, it seems likely to me that this may have detrimental effects to other parts of the A2 corridor, especially the Air Quality Management Areas at Teynham and Ospringe. It is well documented* that new roads often increase car use in the local area so even before the 9,000+ houses are built we may see very little in the way of traffic relief.

* a Google search on “induced traffic” will provide further reading on this.

Loss of high grade agricultural land – we are lucky in North Kent to have some of the best agricultural land in the country, much of which is grade 1 and 2. Faversham is home to the national fruit collection and Teynham is famously the home of the first cherry orchards in the country. The rich soils here and warm summers are perfect for growing fruit and, at a point in time when food security is becoming an ever more pressing issue, to pour concrete over hundreds of hectares of some of the best land in the country would be an incredibly short sighted thing to do.

Water supply and disposal – seemingly every summer now we are urged by Southern Water to conserve water supplies during periods of hot weather. Building on top of aquifers will both reduce the amount of water available and increase demand at the same time. In addition to this we have seen in the news this year that Southern Water simply discharge raw sewage into our local waterways when they can’t keep up with the demand. To have such a massive amount of development taking place in a relatively small area would surely only further exacerbate that problem.

On top of the issues listed above, many more are frequently cited by local residents, including the loss of trees, loss of biodiversity, concerns over light pollution and the effect that this will have on wildlife, and the fact that if it went ahead, this development would effectively join a number of villages which date back to before the Domesday Book into one large suburb of Sittingbourne.

In the days to come I will be submitting an objection to KCC in my capacity as a councillor and also a personal one as a Swale resident to the borough council via their planning portal. I hope that the local residents are finally listened to and that this application is shelved.

Rich Lehmann – KCC Member for Swale East

rich.lehmann@kent.gov.uk

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