660 Homes on Former Broke Hill Golf Club Refused Over Green Belt Harm

Sevenoaks District Council's Development Management Committee has refused outline planning permission for up to 660 homes, a 150-unit retirement village and a care home on the former Broke Hill Golf Club site near Knockholt, voting down officers' recommendation to approve it. The decision, taken on 24 September, is the latest turn in a site this site has been tracking since it first appeared in Sevenoaks' Local Plan in June.

This wasn't the first attempt at the site. A previous application for 800 homes, 320 of them affordable, 150 care units and a sports hub with floodlights had already been decided at appeal - officers told the committee that scheme's sports facilities and floodlighting had been judged to cause landscape harm, with an unmitigated traffic impact. The application refused this week was smaller and different: up to 660 homes (330 affordable), 130 care units, a primary school, local centre, café and country park, with no sports hub. Statutory consultees hadn't raised the same landscape or traffic objections this time around - officers recommended approval, and an amended version of that recommendation, reflecting late observations, was what the committee actually voted on.

The first vote, on the officer recommendation to approve, was lost. Councillors raised two main doubts, neither of them new to anyone who's followed this site's journey through the Local Plan: whether Knockholt station really counts as a well-connected railway station, given no guarantee of step-free access to the platform, and whether Thames Water's response to the application showed genuine confidence it could supply the site, rather than just an absence of formal objection. A second motion, to refuse permission, was then moved and passed. The formal reason: the proposal didn't comply with Green Belt policies GB7(g) and (h), amounted to inappropriate development that is harmful by definition, and - weighed against that harm - no very special circumstances existed to justify allowing it anyway.

This site's Local Plan coverage has already flagged why this decision matters beyond the application itself: Sevenoaks only added Broke Hill to the Plan in June, and Tunbridge Wells Borough Council formally objected in September, partly because the site had never been consulted on before being added and partly over water supply doubts - the same doubt that helped sink this application. TWBC's objection noted the site was only in the Plan "on a provisional basis" while this application was live, warning the housing number could shrink if it was refused. It just was, and Sevenoaks' Local Plan land supply now has a hole where up to 660 homes were expected to go, with the council's options presumably a fresh, even smaller application, an appeal against this refusal, or removing the site from the Plan altogether.

Source: Sevenoaks District Council, Development Management Committee minutes, 24 September 2026