Draw the line: no more mass housing in Faversham & Mid Kent

Draw the line: no more mass housing

Enough is enough. Faversham & Mid Kent can’t cope with the extra 20,000 houses planned to be built over our green fields and farmland over the next few years. We need to stand together to make clear to the Government that we cannot continue with this scale and pace of development.

Recent water outages have shown that we don’t have enough water, and many of our roads are gridlocked without increasing our population by double the size of Faversham.

On top of the 20,000 planned houses for my constituency the Government is changing the planning rules to include a ‘default yes’ for houses on land around rail stations. This will in effect create a free for all to all developers who want to build houses over any green fields around stations and will impact Teynham, Selling, Harrietsham and Hollingbourne to name a few.

This comes after the Government reduced London’s house building targets while at the same time increasing targets for counties in the South East, including Kent.

Solar Farms

Graveney and Pitstock near Rodmersham. Last summer I signed a letter to the Prime Minister calling for a clear ban on large solar developments on our most productive farmland and for the Government to prioritise solar panels on buildings and brownfield sites instead.

Gypsy and Traveller sites

The Government is also requiring Maidstone Council to provide even more Gypsy and Traveller sites despite already having one of the highest number of Gypsy and Traveller pitches in the country. I took this up with Maidstone before Christmas and I am now taking the fight to Ministers.

I am not against sensible-sized developments, but the massive scale of building planned—on top of the many thousands of houses already built in this area—is unsustainable. The bottom line is, Faversham and Mid Kent cannot cope with the scale of development planned and the Government must think again.