A public meeting will be held next week to discuss concerns over the siting of a 20ft phone mast to be installed next to St Saviour’s junior school.
The go-ahead was given last year to Mobile Broadand Network Limited (MBNL), EE Limited and Three (H3G) UK Limited to install the 20m high Monopole disguised as a Cypress Tree with 6 antenna apertures & 2 600mm dishes after Thanet council decided prior approval was not required.
It is to be installed at green space at Westgate Cricket Club which is also St Saviour’s school playing field.
But residents have raised a petition in a bid to stop the installation from going ahead and asked the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, to step in.
An open letter has also been sent to Kent County Council leader Roger Gough outlining KCC’s refusal in 2020 for a former application by a different operator to install a telecoms mast at the same site.
The letter quotes KCC as saying “KCC are not able to progress [the] proposal any further” due to a “precautionary approach” ‘particularly the case on land in the vicinity of schools, where potential health and safety issues are of most concern.”
The letter goes on to ask what has changed since that date.
The application for Westgate says: “This proposal is required to provide continued mobile coverage to the local area, as the existing MBNL (EE and Three) base station, which is situated at St Peters Church, Archdiocese of Southwark Canterbury Road, Westgate, is due for removal.
“This telecommunications site currently provides network coverage to the surrounding area and the potential loss of this site from the network, will result in a loss of communications and data services locally and a wider disruption to the mobile network, if a replacement site, which replicates the lost coverage, cannot be identified and integrated into the network at the earliest opportunity.
“This operational base-station must be decommissioned in the near future, generating need for a replacement site to avoid a coverage gap in the mobile network.”
The public meeting takes place on Tuesday (August 9), 7.15pm, at Christ Church URC, Westgate Bay Avenue and will be attended by school governors, St Saviour’s church members, councillors and residents.
