Contact your Parish Council

Item 16, pages 35-57                                                                        

18/506657/FULL

Land West of Loder Close and Westwood Close, Lenham

Local Representations

·         greenfield site, next to an area of outstanding natural beauty

·         negative impact the infrastructure of a small, medieval village that is already at saturation point given the scale of recent development

·         contrary to the Maidstone Local Plan

·         premature with regards to the emerging Lenham Neighbourhood Plan

·         loss of privacy

·         children's playground - lack of privacy and security, potential for excessive noise and general nuisance from children and teenagers

·         housing provision is both excessive and unreasonable and we will be living next to a building site for years to come

·         overwhelms local roads, infrastructure, medical services and schools

·         Safety issues due to proximity to the junction with the A20

·         congestion during the morning/evening rush hour will cause excessive noise and pollution

Consultations

PC: Lenham Parish Council is extremely disappointed that this application fails to collect a s106 contribution of £159,552.00 as requested by KCC towards primary education. The appropriate CIL money will be collected in any event and may well be needed on a priority basis to fund other projects within the Borough.  The CIL regime was always intended to work alongside s106 in securing essential items of infrastructure to serve proposed new development. In this case the 1000 additional dwellings to be built at Lenham 2021-31 are proposed to be served by a 1FE extension to the existing Lenham Primary School as requested by KCC. All 1000 dwellings (including the current 53) should make proportionate s106 contribution towards this extension to provide certainty that the extra primary school places will be delivered on a timely basis to meet the additional educational needs arising directly from the developments proposed.

Appraisal

The points made by the additional neighbour objections have been addressed in the main committee report.

In response to the PC’s additional concerns, generally speaking, off site infrastructure should be paid out of CIL and the Infrastructure Delivery Plan specifically refers to CIL.

Moreover, the pooling restriction of 5 remains for s106 payments at this point in time and so with a potential delivery of 7 sites in the Lenham “Broad Location”, this site of 53 units out of 1000 does not generate a significant amount of need in relative terms.

Recommendation Unchanged