Massive housing plans to merge 7 villages with Sittingbourne

A developer consortium composed of the Kent Science Park, local landowners and Quinn Estates have put forward plans for a massive 50% increase of urban Sittingbourne, plus a business park to rival Eurolink in size.

The proposal, which is not included in the Council’s development masterplan, is so large that it would merge 7 villages together to become a huge urban expansion of Sittingbourne.

A huge sprawling tract of land starting north of the A2, merging Bapchild, Tonge and Teynham would then make its way southward to the M2 merging Rodmersham, Tunstall, Milstead and Bredgar, while just skirting past Lynsted along the way.

It is really hard to grasp the scale, but from a housing viewpoint alone its approximately the equivalent of adding Faversham on to the side of Sittingbourne. Then we ought to mention the Eurolink sized industrial park that would accompany it, plus even more land for schools and sports facilities.

This scheme has been endorsed by many conservative party members, as both a means to facilitate their own governments ever increasing demands for more housing and as a vehicle for dumping ‘the housing problem’ in one place, namely Sittingbourne, in order to protect their seats in Sheppey and Faversham.

Bad news if like me you live in Sittingbourne and struggle to get a doctor’s appointment or would like your children to attend one of our 5 heavily oversubscribed secondary schools.

Following a public consultation which failed to drum up the necessary public support for the conservatives Garden Communities project, the new leadership at Swale Borough Council provided an alternative plan that sought to deliver a fairer and more balanced approach to housing and employment distribution, better enabling supporting infrastructure for health, education, and transport to cope where at all possible given years of historic underfunding and the abject failure of the conservative controlled Kent County Council to predict birth rate trends.

If this application were to be successful, it would concentrate a significant majority of the borough's housing development into a single site, pushing aside other developers’ sites, already identified in the review of the council’s local plan.

Quinn Estates would have a monopoly on new housing in Sittingbourne, potentially controlling around 70% of the market. They would also control more than 50% of commercial development, flooding the market, when the current plan makes it clear we already have a surplus of commercial space with planning consent.

This would be the largest expansion in Sittingbourne’s history, with 3 out of every 4 new houses planned for Swale built in Sittingbourne.

There are a lot of comments to the planning applications from Just Build Homes. Where are these comming from?

The attached link is very interesting:-

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/questions-need-answering-just-build-homes-rosie-pearson

I have lived in Borden for over 20 years and we moved here so that we could be near greener spaces and have a quite lifestyle however as Swale has been used as a development site for housing attracting more and more people from outside the county it has become an urban traffic jam why are we not adopting a more sensible plan.when Conservatives were running swale they didn’t even know the brown field site locations and it was easier for them to satisfy the masters in parliament to build on farmland and green spaces on mass in the pockets of the greedy developers why don’t we get the Dutch engineers over and drain the area between Sittingbourne and Sheppey build flat pack houses on stilts as this land only has sheep on it,this way you are not upsetting 90% of the people who live in the area.

We should vote against MPs who do not support the local people I never hear any comment on our current Kent MPs no wonder more votes are going for Green MPs

 

Try fighting we did and Bramblefield north and south, and guess what we lost, it's been going on years, we thought we had won then they got a local government/council that agreed, end off, too much money being passed, too much money to be earned, dosent matter about infrastructure, too much money in housing.... 

Much as we all detest Quinn's desire to concrete over Kent and his "interesting" business practices, he is a symptom rather than the disease. The disease is the Government's housing targets for Kent which are wildly disproportionate to local need. Whilst individual councils like Swale usually put up a good fight, the ultimate arbiter is the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government who will make judgements based on the Local Plan, which in turn needs to reflect the Government targets. Heads they win, tails we lose.

If one council steps out of line and rejects the housing targets, major planning decisions for that council will be taken back to Whitehall. On the other hand, if all 12 planning authorities in Kent, plus Medway, rejected the central targets, Government would not have the capacity to manage all 13 and something would have to "give".

The challenge is to find a way of uniting councils which historically have a very poor record of cross border working / thinking. There are ways of doing this, but it needs people who are prepared to put in the time and effort; unfortunately we are all so busy having to fight our own local battles that finding the time is difficult.

 

The need for extra housing is just to make Quinn Estates more money and not think about the devastation of the countryside. There are risks being introduced by these plans, the lack of ground which rain water can be absorbed, this will intern make flooding a bigger risk.

Furthermore the traffic we have in and around the town is unbearable. Adding further vehicles to an already overburden road system will be like living in London. The A249 from Sittingbourne to Maidstone is overwhelmed. When the new flyover goes in it will not make things easier but push the problem further towards Maidstone.

The M2 from Brenley to Gillingham is overwhelmed by vehicles. These days you have to leave an hour earlier just to get London compared to 10years ago. When will people learn. I think never. Leave the green belt to be green and not bricks and mortar

I was born and grew up in Sittingbourne but no longer live here, but to see all that rural area possibly decimated with this house building plan is an utter disgrace and Swale council should hang their heads in shame for even considering it. This is killing the title Kent has of being the "Garden of England". (ANGRY)

As we know Quinn Estates have a supporting cast of tame politicians, the planning inspectorate, sports clubs bought off with promises of new facilities whilst the Kent Online news website does not allow readers comments where Quinn building projects are concerned (presumably for fear of losing advertising revenue from paid for editorials promoting their new builds for sale). This applies to the majority of their sites throughout Kent and beyond.

Even the BBC is now a pawn in their game - if anyone saw South East Today (August 26) local news there was an item about another of Quinn’s ”just what the area needs“ projects at Betteshanger, near Deal, with a wildlife film maker/conservationist being used to promoting a 1000 proposed building site with the added bonus of an existing wildlife areas being enhanced including the possibility of beavers(!) being introduced etc etc. The BBC, in fairness, did tag on a small piece from Hilary Newport of the CPRE pointing out that replacing an area already sustaining wildlife with a nature reserve seemed rather pointless.

This sort of “greenwashing” by developers is becoming the standard where a project is guaranteed to be unpopular - for example how the 8000+ development proposed for Sittingbourne and surrounds is, we are informed, somehow going to reduce pollution by replacing open countryside and fields with little expensive boxes.

whilst I understand people need homes WHY does it all have to be in the south, Kents garden of England is becoming a concrete jungle. You can t move in our area for traffic even country lanes are becoming congested where people try to get off the already traffic logged main roads taking short cuts through narrow lanes.

Our quiet country villages are turning into rat runs for traffic to escape the busy traffic logged roads. WANT a doctors appointment you v got more chance of flying to the moon. Unless you have covid, cancer..or a coronary you are left to get on with it. And elderly people who are not computer friendly stand no chance. Us old will not be dying from covid or any of the above it will be neglect, ailments left un treated. I hear it every day and its frustrating .And with more and more people being let into our country its only going to get worse.

I worry about my family working hard not only to support themselves but every other person who has paid little or nothing into the system. And if you think this is the rant of an old moany old lady I'm not alone. You ask for my comments and I'm afraid this is how me and thousands of other people feel thank you if you read this all.

Absolutely disgusting, the town and surrounding areas are being swamped with housing and the roads cannot cope now, even if there is the planned relief roads with this sort of increase it will do nothing with the traffic in the area, and that's if it is actually done and not a pack of lies like so many times in the past.

None of the development over the years has been great but younhave to accept some, but now it's gone past most people's acceptance and we have had enough, I will never vote for the absolute rubbish party that is making all this happen, and I don't need to announce who they are on here as again everyone knows. You are a complete waste of our vote and a complete and utter ignorant party to anyone voting for you or not as all you are interested in is your own interests and pockets. Absolutely and completely out of touch with anyone else's.

Are there any infrastructure plans to accommodate extras roads, schools, doctors etc?