The spectre of Highsted Park returns to haunt us for Halloween

In a yet another attempt to get this monstrous housing scheme off the ground the developer consortium composed of Quinn Estates, the Kent Science Park and local landowners have yet another version of their plans for a vast 50% urban expansion of Sittingbourne up before the planning committee where it has been recommended for refusal.

So large in fact, that it will consume 7 entire villages on the south and east sides of Sittingbourne and if successful could account for 4 out every 10 houses built in Sittingbourne, Sheppey and Faversham combined for the next 20 years.

This hugely disproportionate development of a single location in Sittingbourne will have a devastating effect on local services and amenities as they struggle to maintain pace with the huge influx of residents, affecting everyone in Sittingbourne regardless of where you live.

This is especially true given the enormous costs associated with the two applications, which would mean difficult choices in terms of what to sacrifice, be that health care, education, the ecology, social infrastructure, sustainable transport or affordable homes, something has to give.

Even where the applicant is able to provide funding towards the cost of a building or provide a plot of land, encouraging KCC, the NHS or the  Kent and Medway ICB to actually provision anything lies completely outside of the applicants control.

Time and time again this essential infrastructure has not materialised, not kept pace with development and in many cases has in fact declined. If you think getting a doctor’s appointment or getting your child into one of the five heavily oversubscribed secondary schools is bad now, its barely comprehensible how bad this could get.

Needless to say, the combined plans for 8,400 houses and business parks etc have not garnered a great deal of local support in its 20 old year history, with the exception of one or two local politicians, the local football club and the previous member of parliament for Sittingbourne and Sheppey.

However, with the recent electoral boundary changes the entire scheme is now part of the Faversham and Mid-Kent consistency and Helen Whately MP has just presented a draft Bill to Parliament which seeks to protect Grade 1 agricultural land for farming, saying;

“Less than 3% of England’s agricultural land is classified as Grade 1. This land is scarce and important for food production. We are fortunate to have a swathe of this wonderful farmland here in Kent. But it is at risk under the pressure from Government to meet housing targets. That’s why I have proposed a new law to protect England’s very best farmland.”

Regarding the application itself Helen told us

“My constituents living near the proposed Highsted Park site are seriously worried about this huge development right on their doorstep. It'll change the area forever.”

“Everyone recognises the need for housing and the difficulty young people face getting onto the property ladder. But we need the right housing in the right place.”

It is also not insignificant that at least 13 local Parish Councils that I counted, as well as hundreds of residents have objected to the two applications. I can’t recall any other planning application where that number of parish councils have jointly objected.

Understanding the scale of the proposals

 

In terms of size the combined applications are equivalent to the number of homes in Faversham and would be one of the largest developments in the UK. In addition to this, there are vast tracts of industrial development equivalent to adding another Eurolink sized industrial park.

Swale Borough Council are currently forecasting as part of their Local Plan to develop 16,640 houses up to 2034, this equates to an annual housing target of 1,040 dwellings over the next 16 years for Swale as a whole. As of April, this year, developers already had planning permission for some 7,047 dwellings that had not yet been built. That is enough housing for nearly 7 years.

To provide some perspective on the enormous scale of the proposals, the applicant for Highsted Park is currently planning to build 8,400 dwellings, delivering 300-500 homes per year for the next 20 years according to their website, which would average some 420 dwellings per annum.

This could, therefore, account for 4 out of every 10 dwellings built in Swale assuming that you believe that this is even vaguely possible, which I do not.

It's probably best to take the total amount of housing planned for this development with a healthy dose of salt, as we all know plans change. Never more so than with this scheme, with its housing numbers ping-ponging in recent years from anywhere from circa 7,000 to 12,500 dwellings.

In fact, as recently as March of this year the numbers had dropped from 8,000 to 7,150 and just seven months later, we are back at 8,400 dwellings. This has been going on for decades now and honestly, it’s hard to take it too seriously.

The affordable housing problem

If all this were not bad enough the development has the potential to significantly undermine Swale Borough Councils’ ability to deliver an appropriate level of affordable housing over the next two decades.

Policy DM8 of the councils Local Plan sets out the approach to securing affordable housing on development proposals with Sittingbourne town centre, urban extensions and Iwade provisioning 10% of each development to be affordable housing, and all other rural areas 40%.

Clearly the vast majority of the application is rural, consisting primarily of high-grade agricultural farmland, important countryside gaps, significant heritage assets and conservation areas that would therefore require 3,360 affordable homes be delivered to meet the 40% plan threshold.

However, in order to make the northern element of the scheme viable the councils independent financial appraisal suggests that the application could only deliver 4.24% of the dwellings as affordable. That is truly shocking and in my humble opinion if the costs associated with bringing this scheme forward are so unbelievably large that the applicant has to start sacrificing its planning obligations by this magnitude, then by the applicants own admission it is not a viable scheme.

The southern application fairs little better with an affordable provision of just 15.83%, but that is still a million miles away from the 40% that the local plan demands.

This comes at a time when the chancellor Rachel Reeves has just announced a plan to deliver 5,000 new affordable social homes with £500 million of new funding.

The whole question around financial viability seems somewhat dependent on what constitutes an acceptable level of profit, and I recall reading an article in The Standard where Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs fame claimed that profits on the average new home have jumped from £6,000 per new dwelling on average in 2009 to a whopping £65,000 per new dwelling on average now.

It does beg the question as to whether perhaps the scales have tipped a little too far in favour of the applicant when it comes to these assessments.

The harm

The councils’ verdict is that both applications fail to secure and provide measures to meet policy requirements and mitigate the impacts of the development in respect of all the following areas:

“Ecology, education, community learning, youth service, social infrastructure, waste, health care, energy, sport and open space, highways and transportation (including sustainable transport), affordable housing, infrastructure delivery, stewardship, management maintenance, Kent Downs National Landscape mitigation and monitoring of planning obligations”

With regards to the heritage assets and development in the countryside the council deem that the harm is not outweighed by the public benefits of the scheme.

The applicant has also failed to provide any exceptional circumstances which would justify the major development in the Kent Downs national landscape and neither have they provided any exceptional reasons for allowing the loss of ancient woodland.

Just building more homes will NOT lower prices

There is a great article on the Guardian website by Phineas Harper that provides some interesting insights, which entirely dispels the myth that building more homes will equate to lower prices.

Looking at Office for National Statistics data over a 50-year period, the UK has been continually building housing faster than the population has been growing. There are now significantly more homes per head of population now that there were in 1971, in fact there is now one dwelling for every 2.25 people, an increase of around 33% over the period.

What is more remarkable is that the Britain has roughly the same amount of homes per head of population as many European countries where housing is more affordable.

To quote Phineas Harper in his recent article for the Guardian “simply building more homes won’t solve our housing crisis”

Attend or watch online

Both planning applications will be reported to the Planning Committee meeting of the Council to be held in the Council Chamber at Swale House on 7 November at 6.00pm. It is anticipated that the application will take more than one evening to be determined and as such the committee will sit again on 11 November & 14 November 2024 if necessary.

There is limited space in our Council Chamber, members of the public can follow the proceedings of the planning committee meeting live via a weblink, which will be published on the Council’s website.

Andy Hudson
Sittingbourne.Me