Change of mind over plans for homes on school fields
Kent County Council has changed its stance on a controversial planning application to build 180 homes on school playing fields.
The county raised no objections on highways grounds when the proposal for the New Line Learning grounds off Boughton Lane was first raised in February 2014.
It has now concluded the scheme would cause severe congestion in Loose Road and will oppose the plans at an appeal.
Barbara Cooper, the county’s corporate director for transport, wrote to the Department of Communities and Local Government saying: “The cumulative impact of recently completed or consented development along the A229 Loose Road and the A274 Sutton Road will lead to an unacceptably severe impact on the local highway network without there being sufficient certainty strategic mitigation can be provided and funded.”
She added that a piecemeal approach to create further capacity at the Swan pub junction on its own, would be unlikely to be help solve traffic and congestion issues across the wider road network.
The new approach, which KCC said was because it now had the result of a traffic modelling exercise which was previously unavailable, will put it on a collision path with Maidstone council.
The borough’s planning officers included the Boughton Lane site among those in its draft Local Plan proposals, albeit for a smaller number of 120 homes. The borough commissioned its own traffic consultants to suggest ways of modifying the crossroads at the Swan so the impact of increased traffic could be mitigated.
The company, Mott MacDonald, suggested there was just one option – allowing traffic from both Cripple Street and Boughton Lane to proceed across the junction at the same time. That suggestion has been condemned as dangerous by the county councillor Ian Chittenden (Lib Dem).
He said: “Traffic lights were first introduced into this junction because of safety concerns and a record of accidents. The proposal is unworkable and unsafe. No safety audits have been carried out to support this.”
The appeal inspector has allowed a three-week delay in the appeal timetable to allow the applicants, BDW Trading, time to respond to the new developments.