A Message from Helen Whately
"Faversham and Mid Kent is a beautiful place, but we are being asked to take more than our fair share. By standing together, we can protect our green spaces and ensure infrastructure comes before development."
Helen Whately MP
Member of Parliament for Faversham & Mid Kent
STOP THE SPRAWL AND SAVE KENT'S COUNTRYSIDE
If you want to STOP THE SPRAWL AND SAVE KENT’S COUNTRYSIDE, sign my petition here.
Enough is enough. Faversham & Mid Kent can’t cope with the extra 20,000 houses planned to be built over our green fields and farmland over the next few years. We need to stand together to make clear to the Government that we cannot continue with this scale and pace of development.
Recent water outages have shown that we don’t have enough water, and many of our roads are gridlocked without increasing our population by double the size of Faversham.
This comes after the Government reduced London’s house building targets while at the same time increasing targets for counties in the South East, including Kent.
And that’s not all – we also have:
Solar Farms
Graveney and Pitstock near Rodmersham. Last summer I signed a letter to the Prime Minister calling for a clear ban on large solar developments on our most productive farmland and for the Government to prioritise solar panels on buildings and brownfield sites instead.
Gypsy and Traveller sites
The Government is also requiring Maidstone Council to provide even more Gypsy and Traveller sites despite already having one of the highest number of Gypsy and Traveller pitches in the country. I took this up with Maidstone before Christmas and I am now taking the fight to Ministers.
I am not against sensible-sized developments in or adjacent to towns, or small, well-designed developments in or around villages, I know we need to build homes, and young people are staying on living with parents for longer and longer because of the cost of housing. The problem is the massive scale of building planned, on top of the many thousands of houses already built in this area in recent years – along with the failure of the planning system to consider the impact of all these new developments in combination. The bottom line is, Faversham and Mid Kent cannot cope with the scale of development planned and the Government must think again.
If you agree with me that enough is enough please sign my STOP THE SPRAWL AND SAVE KENT’S COUNTRYSIDE below so I can take the strength of feeling against this scale of development to Ministers.
Thank You!
Your support helps me take the strength of feeling to Ministers.