UK 

Local activists fight Green Belt developers

AUGUST 28, 2025

Kent villagers are organising against an ill-conceived plan that would destroy local amenities and increase pollution, reports Dave Mitchelmore.

Two villages adjacent to Maidstone are facing housing developments on three sites that would eat into Green Belt land and make existing traffic congestion and pollution levels even more intolerable.

Wateringbury and East Malling lie a stone’s throw from the western section of the M20 in Kent. This proximity, coupled with the lack of an up to date Local Plan for Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, (TMBC), renders these semi-rural villages susceptible to the relentless drive to build new homes, irrespective of the suitability of such developments for the area.

The vulnerability to these developments that the villages face has local and national features. TMBC’s local plan expired more than five years ago and the Council therefore does not have an adopted strategy for meeting housing needs, meaning that developers are able to propose new residential schemes within sustainable locations and expect to receive a positive outcome.

In December 2024, the Government revised the National Planning Policy Framework which included changes to the Metropolitan Green Belt. One change was to introduce a Grey Belt Policy, which allows residential development of Green Belt sites that are within a sustainable location and would not undermine the purposes of the wider Green Belt. The three sites under threat lie either within or adjacent to the Metropolitan Green Belt.

The so called ‘Golden Rules’ surrounding this policy demand that submitted developments must prove 50% of homes would be ‘affordable’, clearly a very loaded stipulation. As TMBC can demonstrate only 3.1 years of a five-year housing land supply there is clearly an ‘un-met housing need’.

Faced with this situation, opponents of one of the latest proposed developments in East Malling, on land currently an orchard, rejoiced when a full meeting of TMBC rejected an application to build 52 homes on the site in April this year. Unfortunately, Esquire, the builder, have sought to appeal the decision and in August word came that another development is proposed within the village boundary.

Wateringbury, which is directly adjacent to East Malling, would lose the wonderful amenity of a glorious view of the Medway Valley should this application to build be successful. This loss of amenity would also be felt by neighbouring villages. The proposed development would occupy a site currently consisting  of fields where horses and ponies are stabled.

 Dozens of residents in both villages are currently working together to oppose these proposals. The villages are linked by a crossroads which already experiences urban levels of pollution and traffic congestion. This is set only to significantly deteriorate if the developers get their way.

East Malling has a long tradition of opposing these developments, with some stalwart support from individual councillors. This is not the case in Wateringbury, but the threat of this development has galvanised the village into action via word of mouth and, you’ve guessed it, WhatsApp. Three meetings have been held with over 60 residents signed up to the Protect Our Medway Valley group (POMV). At the time of writing, the tenant has finally been served with an application for planning permission after six months of shadow boxing between Croudace, the developers, and POMV.      

We have approached Tom Tugenhat, the local MP and local councillors, but clearly our strength lies in pinpointing where proposals clash with local and national policies, doing our homework and organising opposition to these developments that not only would further blight the West Kent countryside but also avoid tackling the underlying housing crisis that Labour is emphatically failing to address.

Dave Mitchelmore is Convenor of Protect Our Medway Valley and a resident of Wateringbury. 

Image: Wateringbury. https://www.flickr.com/photos/adambowie/36653935146/in/photostream/ Author: Adam Bowie. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed