Massive housing plans to merge 7 villages with Sittingbourne
29 Aug 2021
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.
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