At 18.30 hrs on March 9th, Medway Council’s Planning Committee will be meeting to approve or reject the application by Vineyard Farms Ltd to build a colossal restaurant, café, wine bar and visitor’s centre with a 5 million bottles-a-year wine manufacturing plant in the basement (the “Kentish Wine Vault”) on green belt land and a designated Kent Downs area of outstanding natural beauty at Upper Bush, near Cuxton.
The KWV facility will cost an estimated £30m and has been
designed by the notorious firm of luxury architects, Foster and Partners. It is
being funded by the owner of Vineyard Farms Ltd, a Mr. Mark Dixon, boss of
international office rental company IWG, self-made billionaire,
The building is nearly twice the size of a football pitch and much of it will be buried underground, requiring the excavation of over 160,000 cubic metres of chalk spoil.
The combination of its size, nature and intended location
breaks every green belt/AONB planning guideline and regulation in the book -
guidelines and regulations that were intended to protect the
This has not stopped Medway Council’s planners from enthusiastically championing both the design itself and the developer’s assertions that the building is an “agricultural” one and is therefore exempt from planning considerations that would otherwise preclude its construction in its intended form and location.
Dubious, weak “legal precedents” and the utterly ridiculous floor-space argument (only 8% of building’s floor space is dedicated to the restaurant/café/visitors’ centre, so it therefore must be an “agricultural building”: this would be like EDF claiming that because only 8% of a nuclear power station reactor consists of enriched uranium, radiation protection regulations don’t apply to them!) have been used to justify the unjustifiable in terms of proceeding with the KMV.
At the last planning meeting in December, Medway Councilss planners strongly recommended that the planning committee approve the plans, mostly on the basis that the Foster design was really, truly wonderful and that, as it was just an “agricultural building”, it would not have to be referred to the Secretary of State for ratification.
Fortunately, enough councillors were sceptical enough about the whole smoke-screen and it was decided to defer the decision.
Vineyard Farms, much to their chagrin, were told to go away and fill in some of the gaps in their already voluminous and bewildering array of documentation and glossy Foster & Partners-authored propaganda.
As it turned out, Vineyard Farms had some two months to come up with something more substantial to address some of the planning committee member’s concerns.
And they failed to do so. At a question and answer session, held on 22nd. February between members of the planning committee and Vineyard Farms’ extensive team of undoubtedly expensive consultants, all the councillors got was another lot of glossy pictures and propaganda, with the same old arguments repeated, reheated and regurgitated again.
The same discredited traffic survey was held up as evidence
that the development would not add to Cuxton’s
Indeed, a couple of councillors actually questioned the principle of the development and got treated to a wonderful dose of circular and selective reasoning (paraphrased below)…
Q: “This is not an agricultural scheme, so should the application be for a tourist attraction?”
A: “The basement wine manufacturing plant in our KWV is 92% of the building’s volume, so it is therefore an agricultural building…”
Q: “So why not lose the 8% of unnecessary add-ons and avoid the planning and tourist traffic issues?”
A: “Ah, then the facility wouldn’t meet our business plan…”
Q: “So you are saying that this is, in fact, a mixed-use facility rather than a purely agricultural building…?”
A: “No, because the basement wine manufacturing plant in our KWV is 92% of the building’s volume, so it is therefore an agricultural building…”
And now, belatedly, some six months after Vineyard Farms submitted their application, it seems that at some point recently, Medway Council’s planning department stopped copying the applicant’s homework and actually did some of their own.
In the agenda notes for Wednesday’s planning meeting, right on the last page of the section for the winery discussion (p. 79), comes this little bombshell…
“Following the
Planning Committee Meeting on 8 December 2021, further legal advice was provided….due to the provision of the visitor
centre and café/restaurant which would measure more than 1,000m². it was considered that the proposed
development would constitute inappropriate development in the Green Belt
and therefore (in) accordance with
The Town and Country Planning (Consultation) (England) Direction 2021, if the
Planning Committee is minded to grant planning permission, the authority shall consult the Secretary of State.”
All of the discussions in the agenda notes about various sections of the NPPF are rendered void because the development is simply “inappropriate” for the green belt. You’d like to think that this absolutely basic piece of “legal advice” – whether the development was “appropriate” for green belt land in the first place – should have been sought at the pre-application stage? Surely if the application is “inappropriate” then should it have been rejected at the outset?
This is completely the opposite story to what was given to the councillors at the last planning meeting. Had the planning committee members been told that they were being asked to approve an “inappropriate” development, would they have rejected the application outright, rather than just deferred the decision? Who knows?
Nevertheless, the minor matter of the development being “inappropriate” for the area hasn’t stopped Medway Council’s planners from recommending that the planning committee councillors still approve it at Wednesday’s meeting.
And this is the nub of the matter.
I do not, for one second, doubt or question the integrity of any of the councillors serving on Medway’s planning committee. Their role is to evaluate the benefits that any development may bring and balance them against the possible harm caused. Whatever their decision on Wednesday, it has to be respected.
But the councillors themselves are not planning experts, nor do they have the time to delve into the detailed documentation associated with each application. And in the case of huge, complex submissions like the KWV, the councillors are dependent upon the advice of their planning department.
A planning department that seems to have largely accepted everything they have been told by the wealthy, well-resourced developer and its prestigious architects...
A planning department that took six months to realise that, by the terms of national planning guidelines, the development is “inappropriate” for the green belt site on which it is intended for - something they might have learned earlier had they taken the scheme's critics (e.g. The Kent Area AONB unit and Cuxton's Parish Council) seriously, rather than ignoring them...
So, on Wednesday night, Medway Council’s planning committee meets to decide whether or not to approve the “inappropriate” KWV development.
It has to consider whether the benefits of the fantastic expense, cachet and glamour of a potentially award-winning Foster & Partners design (and the commercial ambitions of a private company) take precedent over national protections for green belt /AONB land that state that such a development would be “inappropriate”, a development that would also badly damage the quality of life for the residents of Cuxton and Upper Bush.
Will they reject what is essentially a billionaire tax-exile’s “inappropriate” vanity project?
Or will they take the Pontius Pilate option and approve it, effectively washing their hands of the final decision and letting the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, make it instead?
It’s a tough call…
No comments:
Post a Comment