A further 36 properties will be built off Tothill Street at Minster – bringing total development at the site to 250- after Thanet council granted planning permission.
A notice of planning approval was published last Friday (October 4).
The properties will be in addition 214 properties that were approved for outline planning in September 2021 despite councillors’ concerns over traffic, school places, adequate medical facilities and the number of houses on the site.
The 214 property application area is 34.67 acres, with proposed residential development and associated open space and services on approximately 32.27 acres and a reserve site of 2.40 acres proposed for the future extension to Minster Cemetery.
The land on the west side of Tothill Street, Minster, is owned by St. John’s College Cambridge and Spanton Farms Limited. The site is on a Special Protection Zone.
Barratt David Wilson Homes are currently carrying out the first phase of development for 133 dwellings at the northern area of the site which will be accessed via a new junction onto Tothill Street.
The additional 36 homes were submitted as ‘phase 2b’ by David Wilson Homes and will be made up of two 1-bed flats, two 2-bed flats, three 2-bed houses, 26 three-bed houses, and three 4-bed houses with two parking spaces per dwelling.
Eight letters of objection were submitted against the ‘phase 2b’ development raising aconcerns about impact on the area, loss of space, impact on infrastructure and traffic, increased pollution, safety of swale and impact on wildlife due to depth, flood risk and saying that the homes would be too small.
Minster Parish Council ask for clarification on whether properties that bound Greenhill Gardens will be 1.5 storey in line with the bungalows that they will back on to and that permitted development rights would be withdrawn to ensure they cannot be extended to make them 2 storey buildings at a later date.
The parish council also registered a strong objection to the scheme, saying: “ Given the very serious safety concerns that are obvious now that cross-sections of the eastern swale intended for the site are now known and publicly available, Minster Parish Council most strongly objects to this application.
“It also requests that the TDC Planning Department revisits the earlier applications and ensures that this objection is reflected on those regarding the swales included in the already “consented” applications.
“The latest application by BDW is the first to carry any cross-section drawings of what are referred to as swales, either shown or mentioned in any of the various applications pertaining to this whole site to date. No other documents show these, unless they are held by the Planning Department and haven’t been published.
“Given the design and layout of the drawings for the swale at the rear of the properties in Greenhill Gardens and the considerable difference in level, we consider that the proposal is fundamentally unsafe given the proximity of the adjacent footpath and adjacent properties. In fact one could liken the proposal to an open sewer of old, albeit for surface water.”
Thanet council’s planning officer said an amended section plan showed a reduction to the depth of the swale and objections had not been received from Southern Water. They added that the swale had already been approved through the reserved matters application for phase 1.
The officer acknowledged a further 36 dwellings will put further pressure on the highway network, and so a further financial contribution towards off site highway works of £27,925 must be paid.
The application proposes 11 of the homes will be ‘affordable’ equating to 30%.
The Tothill site is allocated for 250 properties in the Thanet Local Plan.
The planning officer added: “The proposed development will deliver sustainable housing within the village confines, which is supported by local plan policy; the benefits of which significantly outweigh the harm.”
Thanet resident Craig Solly, who is among those campaigning against overdevelopment, builds on agricultural land and asking for changes to Local Plan housing estimates and allocations, said: “Minster villagers have made it clear for some time that this is overdevelopment to the Village and looking at how much housing there is, I totally agree with them.
“We need to protect our rural area very much to what local policy is. The issue is that there are other applications which are not allocated in the Local Plan that are being challenged on appeal. This raises the question of how effective the local plan is and whether it’s accelerating house building in the rural area.
“Thanet council needs to consider the role of our rural and farming areas in Thanet as we are losing valuable high quality farmland.”
Work on phase one of the overall development is currently taking place. This is for 133 properties and 40% of the foundations have now been laid with full building works due to start over the coming months.
On phase one 40 properties will be affordable housing (24 affordable rent bought by Thanet council and 16 shared ownership).
The detailed layout of development, its scale and appearance, and the landscaping for phase one was approved by councillors in June 2023.
Thanet Local Plan
Thanet’s Local Plan -– a blueprint for housing, business and infrastructure development up to 2031- was adopted on 9 July 2020 and the housing need calculated up to 2031 was for 17,140 new isle homes. This was based on 2014 population projections which have since been called into question for over-inflating need.
The previous Government indicated that, in 2024, there would be a review of the impacts of the housing “standard method”, and the latest population and household projections would be published. However, these have now been delayed until 2025, setting back Thanet’s intended programme by about a year.
In 2021 a partial update to the Local Plan was being prepared to cover needs up to 2040 – and included the need for land/sites to accommodate an additional 4,000-4,500 dwellings to make a total of 21,700 homes.
Thanet Conservative Group is calling for Thanet’s Local Plan to be revoked. Group leader Reece Pugh will bring a motion to a full council meeting next week which calls for the Plan to be ditched with consultation launched for a new Local Plan. The group also asks for the removal of current housing allocations on Grade 1 agricultural land to be, if necessary, reallocated to land of poorer quality or brownfield sites and for more housing allocation on brownfield and underutilised sites within town centres.
However, council leader Rick Everitt (Labour) says council officers made it clear two months ago that the council has no power to revoke the Local Plan.
A report to councillors in July said: “The council does not have the power to unilaterally rescind the existing Local Plan before preparing a new plan. There is a power for the Secretary of State (SoS) to revoke a local plan at the request of a local planning authority. It is understood that no such request has ever been made, and the SoS has never exercised this power. MHCLG (Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government) advice is that there would be a very high bar for any such request.”
The motion will be introduced at the full council meeting on October 10th.
If the council agrees to debate the motion, it will be deferred until the next meeting in December so that an officer report can be prepared to inform the debate.
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