Councillors Overrule Officers to Refuse Countryside Home at Boughton Monchelsea

Maidstone Borough Council's planning committee has refused a scheme to replace a mobile home with a permanent house at Wierton Hill Farm, Boughton Monchelsea - overruling its own planning officers, who had recommended approval.

The application, reference 26/501191/FULL, sought permission to remove the existing mobile home on the site and replace it with a permanent self-build dwelling. The only previous planning history on the land is a certificate confirming the mobile home's use as a residential dwelling was already lawful. An agent for the applicant, Mr Oliver, addressed the committee at its meeting on 20 August, and minutes of that meeting were only published this week.

Members went against the recommendation of the Head of Planning and Economic Development, voting 12-1 to refuse. They found that the new building's scale, massing and height would be a "domesticating, suburbanising addition" causing significant visual harm to the countryside's character, made worse by the extra domestic paraphernalia a permanent house would bring - and concluded that, on balance, the scheme did not amount to providing an additional dwelling at all. Councillors also ruled the proposal would create an isolated dwelling in the countryside with no essential need for a home in that location, putting it at odds with national and local planning policy.

It's a reminder that a planning committee doesn't have to follow its own officers' advice, even on a scheme officers judge to be policy-compliant - and, for a site whose only formal status until now was a lawful mobile home, a marker that Maidstone's councillors are drawing a firm line against permanent countryside building creeping in by degrees. The applicant can appeal the refusal to the Planning Inspectorate. Source: Maidstone Borough Council