62 Homes South of Marden Road, Staplehurst Approved - Despite Parish Council's Call for Refusal

The 62-home scheme south of Marden Road, Staplehurst has been approved. Maidstone Borough Council's Planning Committee voted on Thursday 15 October to grant planning permission, following officers' recommendation - resolving the application we reported was recommended for approval ahead of that meeting, despite sitting outside the village's settlement boundary and not being allocated for housing.

Staplehurst Parish Council told the committee it wanted the scheme refused outright, calling it "yet another expansion of the existing village envelope" contrary to both the Local Plan and the Staplehurst Neighbourhood Plan. Its objection centred on a protected hedge that would be removed to make way for a drainage swale at the site entrance - home, the parish council said, to wildlife including adders, with much of the required biodiversity compensation delivered off-site rather than replacing what's lost. It also raised long-standing sewage and surface-water flooding problems on Marden Road, pointing to an aging treatment plant already close to capacity and recent years of water shortages severe enough that a local volunteer group has had to distribute bottled water.

Committee members for the area raised similar concerns before the vote. Cllr Perry argued the hedge should remain protected, as the committee itself had previously agreed, and said Marden Road's "19th-century creaking sewage system" meant more homes would mean more problems for existing residents, suggesting the application be deferred until drainage issues were resolved. A fellow ward councillor added a traffic point: a 2015 highways assessment of the Staplehurst crossroads, modelled on just 200 additional homes, had found every approach already over 100% capacity - and more than 700 homes have been built in the area since. Planning officers responded that drainage upgrades are a matter for Southern Water under separate legislation, not something the applicant can be required to fix pre-emptively, and that the additional traffic delay calculated for this scheme specifically was 3.3 seconds, not a measure of current queuing.

The committee's reasoning came down to the same housing-supply arithmetic set out in the officers' report: with Maidstone able to show only 3.6 years of land for new homes against the five years required, national planning policy creates what one member described as a "tilted balance" in favour of approving developments like this one. Fernham Homes, the applicant, had also made late changes to address specific concerns - moving the best wildlife habitat on site to replace poorer habitat near the road, adding solar panels alongside the air source heat pumps and EV charging already proposed for every home, and securing written confirmation from South East Water that capacity for the 62 homes has been reserved without needing network upgrades. A first vote on the night was declared void after officers identified a miscount; a second vote confirmed the result, and planning permission was granted as recommended, subject to conditions and the Section 106 agreement already outlined in the committee report.

Source: Maidstone Borough Council Planning Committee, 15 October 2026 (recorded webcast, Maidstone Council Webcastings), application 26/500660/FULL