125 Homes Approved on Eridge Road Farmland Despite Road Safety Objections

Farmland off the A26 Eridge Road, on the edge of the Ramslye estate, will become 125 new homes after Tunbridge Wells Borough Council's planning committee approved developer Dandara's scheme on 16 September. Fifty of the homes will be affordable, with the rest built for open market sale. The site was already earmarked for housing in the borough's adopted Local Plan, so the principle of building here wasn't really in question; what the committee had to weigh up was whether this specific scheme, and its access onto a busy A-road, was safe and deliverable.

That question produced real debate. Objectors raised serious concerns about highway safety on the A26, water supply resilience and the impact on the High Weald National Landscape, and committee members reportedly expressed personal reservations about the road's safety themselves. Kent County Council's own highways team, however, raised no objection to the application. The committee ultimately backed officers' recommendation to approve, citing the site's allocation in the Local Plan, the 50 affordable homes, biodiversity net gain and infrastructure contributions - but attached two informatives to the decision: one asking for further work on more robust crossing arrangements on the A26, another urging the developer to explicitly market the homes as car-free or with no on-site parking.

Water supply was a recurring theme. Officers told the committee that providing water to new homes is a statutory duty on water companies rather than something the planning process itself controls, and that South East Water had confirmed capacity for the planned growth - though residents raised concerns about the water company's past performance and the reliability of supply given recent, well-publicised issues in the area.

This 125-home phase is only part of what Dandara has in mind for the wider site. The developer's own website describes "Land at Spratsbrook Farm" as a 170-acre plot straddling the Kent/East Sussex border, of which only the northern part - released from the Green Belt and covered by this approval - sits in Tunbridge Wells. The southern part falls inside the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is being separately promoted through Wealden District Council's own Local Plan process; taken together, Dandara says the combined site "has the potential to deliver in the region of 700 new homes." The approved 125-home scheme sits between Friezland Wood, Ramslye Wood and Three Acre Woods, with its boundary overlapping the edge of High Rocks hill fort, a scheduled Iron Age monument.

The same meeting also approved a second major scheme - 104 homes, including 32 affordable, on the former Hendy Ford garage site on Mount Ephraim - making it a particularly busy night for housing decisions in the town. As of this week, the Spratsbrook Farm application's formal decision notice had not yet been logged on the council's public planning register, which still showed the case as "awaiting decision" - a normal lag between a committee's vote and the paperwork catching up, not a sign the outcome is in doubt. Sources: Tunbridge Wells Borough Council Planning Committee, TWBC planning register, ref. 26/00094/FULL, Open Council Network, Dandara