Dirty Tricks...

The original closing date on Medway Council’s planning portal for to comments on the Vineyard Farms plans to build a luxury restaurant complex on Bush Valley was September 22nd. last year.  At one point, there were over 230 objections and only 15 letters of support for them.

Mysteriously, the portal has been kept open. This seems unusual, to say the least.

Purely coincidentally, I’m sure, Vineyard Farms have recently placed an advert on Facebook, begging for support.

The Facebook ad sends you to their web-page and invites you to fill in a proforma that will e-mail Medway Council with a letter of support “on your behalf”. None of this nonsense having to register with the council web-site or composing your own reasons for supporting the Vineyard Farms scheme: Vineyard Farms will do all that for you. 

How nice of them.

In summary, Medway’s Planning department have, by all appearances, decided to allow a developer more time to try and garner public support for their pet project and are allowing generic e-mailed correspondence sent from said developer to count as “support” for it.

On that basis, perhaps Medway Council will allow the 1,000+ signatures on the Change.orgpetition to count as individual objections to the scheme…(and please sign the petition if you haven't already!).

(Update, February 16th): if, like me, you were thinking that perhaps the Vineyard Farms auto-generated e-mail approach as a way of trying to gather support could be open to abuse, then you'll be amused to hear that none other than our local MP, Kelly Tolhurst, has been writing to people telling them that someone has submitted a fake letter of support for the winery to the council in her name. Kelly is not happy at someone hijacking her name and address, unsurprisingly.

A quick look at the Council portal shows that, yes indeed, Kelly's name and address was used on a Vineyard Farms template in an apparently spurious letter of support.

Perhaps Medway Council should therefore take down ALL of the support letters for the Vineyard Farms proposals received from their Facebook advert template, as the identities of the senders obviously cannot be verified. Anyone with a postal mailing list could start sending in fake letters of support. Maybe we'll even get to see support letters from M. Mouse, D. Duck, T. Tempest or J.T. Kirk on the council's portal...

Unlike Vineyard Farms, I don’t have a slick PR machine backed by a billionaire tax exile to help propagate my view of the world.  Neither do I have the backing of Medway Council's planning department to allow the posting of my own propaganda on Medway council's website - unlike Vineyard Farms. 

If, however, your views on this are similar to mine and you have yet to register a formal objection to the Vineyard Farms scheme with Medway Council, you can click on the link below: 

https://kentishwinevault.com/ 

and then go to the "Submit Your Objection" option on the bottom left-hand corner of the web-page.  It's quick and easy and avoids having to faff about registering on Medway Council's planning portal.

Alternatively, you could:

·           send your objection to planning.representations@medway.gov.uk. (Clicking on the link should start an e-mail in your e-mail account with the address already put in.)

·           call the title of the e-mail: “Objection:  MC/21/2328 - Construction of a winery building on Land South Of Bush Road Near Cuxton, Medway, Kent.”

·           you'll need to include your name and address for the objection to carry any weight.

If you haven’t already, please take the time to e-mail Medway Council with your objection to the plans of Vineyard Farms, as above.