Rural housing proposals blasted at public inquiry

There wasn’t a vacant seat in the public gallery at Maidstone Town Hall on the resumption of the public inquiry into the town’s Local Plan this week.

The inspector Robert Mellor was seeking views on whether the borough council’s approach of diversifying much of the required house-building to “rural service centres”, such as Headcorn, Staplehurst and Lenham, was the correct one.

Certainly not, was the response from Dr Rebecca Driver, a planning consultant engaged by Headcorn Parish Council.

Dr Driver said the borough council had made a fundamental mistake in considering rural service centres were just as sustainable as the urban area of Maidstone.

She said a key consideration was whether there were jobs to support the new population. Research had revealed that the 11 urban wards of Maidstone averaged 18.69 jobs per hectare, whereas the rural wards averaged only 0.62 jobs per hectare.

Even within the rural parishes, such job opportunities were often widely dispersed, she said, citing Headcorn’s biggest employer as Barradale Farm, 1.7km from the village centre.

She said Maidstone had not followed the examples of other boroughs: Ashford had ascribed only 175 homes to Tenterden, which is twice the size of Headcorn, in its Local Plan, and Tunbridge Wells only 270 homes to Cranbrook, again twice Headcorn’s size. Maidstone had marked Headcorn down for 423.

For the council, Tony Fullwood said the urban areas would still be taking “the lion’s share” of new housing at 64%. The borough was keen to re-use brown- field sites but there were two good reasons some development should go to rural areas.

The extra population would support local enterprise and the additional infrastructure that came with development would help the existing community.

Helen Grant MP was due to appear at the hearing yesterday (Thursday).