Plans for a 2,500-home village on a golf course just outside Swanley have been based on improvements to the M25 that might never happen, according to National Highways.
Sevenoaks District Council is proposing a new settlement at Pedham Place, next to junction 3 of the motorway, as part of its local plan.
The council recently closed the first consultation on the plan – the policy which governs the location and scale of house building in the district from 2025 to 2040.
Sevenoaks is proposing the settlement to meet an “acute” need for homes in the district. Two developers, Gladman and Ramac, are backing the plan.
Wasps rugby club has also been in discussions with Sevenoaks about building a new stadium at Pedham Place, along with a hotel and gym.
National Highways, which manages the main road network outside London, has raised concerns in its response to the Pedham Place plan, saying the information used by Sevenoaks to develop the proposal was “inaccurate”.
A spokesperson said: “This information was included, in good faith, in a council presentation by a consultant working on the Pedham Place development proposal circa 2022.
“Currently there are no programmed improvement proposals at M25 junction three.”
National Highways said that the impact of a new settlement at Pedham Place on the roads was “untested”, but when more detailed plans come forward new evidence will be submitted for its assessment. It said it would be meeting the council to discuss its views later this month.
A Sevenoaks Council spokesperson said: “We are currently considering all of the comments and representations made by local people and agencies.
“These will be taken into account before we publish the revised version of the local plan in the summer.
“We are also working with National Highways and Kent County Council to share details of our plans as they develop.”
Vince Robson, chairman of Eynsford Parish Council, said that the proposals for the new village were “basically urban sprawl.”
He said: “Pedham Place is probably two miles from any nearest train station so people will probably have to have a car because there’s limited public transport here.
“We’re thinking about quite a few thousand more cars in that area. That’s why they’ve got an issue with it because there really is only one road in and out.”
He suggested that it would make sense to “nibble at the greenbelt” with numerous smaller sites rather than build a whole new village.
Su Hewitt, who has been campaigning against the development, said there were always traffic problems in her home village of Farningham.
“I used to commute to London, it used to take me half an hour to get from Farningham to Swanley station just to get the train, and sometimes the train would get into London quicker than me doing the two-and-a-half mile drive to Swanley station,” she said.
“If it goes ahead I think it would be a disaster. It just seems impossible, and when you throw the stadium into that as well as the hotel – I don’t know how that could be possible.”
Daniel Esson is a local democracy reporter in Kent, covering councils including Dartford, Sevenoaks and Gravesham. He is based at the Kent Messenger. The video is from Gabriel Morris, a multimedia local democracy reporter based at KMTV.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service is a BBC-funded scheme to boost the reporting of councils in the local media.
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