Thumbs Down...

"How many more awkward bloody peasants have I got to fight...?"

I expect that Vineyard Farms bosses are a bit fed up at the moment.

Despite the extensive and bedazzling layers of gloss and glitter provided by their expensive designers, Foster & Partners….

…despite their employment of hordes of well-paid experts and consultants…

…despite all of the spin and propaganda about the “enhancements” and benefits that the Kentish Wine Vault would bring to Medway, the locality, and the green belt/AONB that it was to be built upon…

…and despite (most importantly of all) having the support and advocacy of Medway Council’s planning officers…

…the elected councillors who sit on Medway’s Planning Committee voted (by 8 votes to 5 - with one abstention) to reject the Vineyard Farms proposals for the building of the Kentish Wine Vault on the green belt land and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that is Bush Valley at Upper Bush, Cuxton.

So now what?

Naturally, I was interested in Vineyard Farms’ reaction to this latest set-back to their plans. True to form, local click-bait “news” site, KentOnLine, only gave us half the story, one that certainly didn’t tell us about the applicant’s views on the decision.

The view of Barrow Hill you NEVER see in the media - they prefer the ones with Lord Foster's Xanadu in it...

Fortunately, the on-line Architect’s Journal had written quite a decent news article, one which included a quote from Vineyard Farms CEO, Gary Smith, who said (in an admittedly anodyne fashion):

“We are of course disappointed that Medway Council has rejected our plans for a new world-class winery. As an agricultural business, we have a clear need for a new winemaking facility. We will now take time to review all planning options available to us as we consider our next steps,” …

One would like to think that those “next steps” would involve perhaps backing off a bit and compromising. 

As Councillor Matt Fearn stated in his address to the committee (and if the Council’s planning portal is anything to go by), Medway’s residents are 3 to 1 against the winery, while Cuxton residents are 15 to 1 against it.  

It’s clear that the vast majority of people, near and far, don’t want your unnecessary, vainglorious Kentish Wine Vault, Vineyard Farms. They’d rather our green belt/ANOB at Upper Bush was left alone, thank you. That must surely have dawned upon you by now.

Nevertheless, I suspect Vineyard Farms will probably want to persist with the fragile assertion that their restaurant, café, wine bar and visitor’s centre with their wine plant in the basement is really only an “agricultural building” and one which just HAS to built on Upper Bush because of the even more fragile assertion that the quality of the wine would suffer if the precious grapes were to be transported, even just a few miles away, to an off-site winery.

Rather than back off, Vineyard Farms will probably appeal against the decision of the planning committee's councillors, which will result in a Public Inquiry. 

It seems somewhat odd that in a so-called democracy, a private company can appeal to central government in order to overturn a majority decision made by democratically-elected local councillors, and seek to impose its unpopular and profit-driven, selfish plans upon local people.  

You'd like to think that Vineyard Farms would ask itself if that is a route it really wants to go down. Appealing against the council's decision would be a public relations disaster, at least locally.  

It would show a sorry lack of corporate self-awareness. It would show that it couldn't care less about the opinions of its neighbours and its elected representatives. 

But I guess Vineyard Farms aren't that bothered. They have a mega-rich owner and their eye on the long game, with national and multi-national aspirations. They're not too worried about a few local peasants and their plebeian representatives. They know everything will be forgotten once the concrete starts pouring anyway. At four times the acreage, it's an ultra-Denbies I suspect they really wish to build, with the 350,000+ visitors a year and the hotels, conference centres and corporate hospitality facilities to go with them.  This is just the first phase, the thin end of a very thick wedge.

Normally a public inquiry would be held in front of a government planning inspector, but given the development in question's £30m price tag, the final decision is likely to go all the way up to the Secretary of State for Housing etc. etc., Michael Gove.

This, of course, would have been the result had the planning committee approved the plans anyway, which is why the protesters are not celebrating the result of Wednesday’s planning meeting as a victory. They know the real decision has yet to be made.

The video of the March 9^th planning committee meeting leading to the rejection of the VF plans is attached below: (Update: this video has since been taken down, presumably by the council).

From my unimportant perspective, I was reasonably impressed with the planning committee’s discussions as compared to last November’s effort. The councillors who spoke were, for the most part, knowledgeable and much better informed. Even Dave Harris, whilst he still came across as all in favour of the application, wasn’t as openly biased as he was last time. He did actually refer to some of the scheme’s critics and their arguments and it was, I felt, a balanced and fair performance from him, given his recommendation to approve.

Even the councillors in favour of the development made some good points, although their supposedly first-hand observations about the traffic in Bush Road were quite laughably false. There was also the argument that, well, we’ve got lots of countryside, so who’s going miss the little bit at Upper Bush?

I won’t even comment on that.

There was an awful lot of discussion about the traffic in Bush Road. It seems that the somewhat contrived nature of the Vineyard Farms-sponsored traffic survey still hasn’t been called out. I have no doubt that the HGV movements to and from the site of the KWV will cause chaos in Cuxton, but to be honest, I think that the additional tourist traffic won’t make a lot of difference if it is out of school hours. There are already too many cars going up and down Bush Road. Will a few more really matter?

If (or more likely, when) Vineyard Farms decide to go down the appeals route, then the following factors need to be considered.

First and foremost, I just can’t see Medway Council's planners working too hard to get a rejection of the plans that they have so vigorously championed. There are some very senior people in Medway Council who want the KWV to happen, even if the populace and their elected representatives don’t.

Secondly, the grounds for rejecting the application need to be absolutely crystal clear. It all seemed a little bit emotional and woolly on Wednesday night. I am not 100% sure that the traffic argument will cut it, mostly because the questionable data from the original traffic survey is too embedded to be discarded. Medway's traffic experts are saying that the data (good or bad) is telling them that the additional physical risk posed by the development-related traffic will not be significant. That opinion will be the one listened to by a planning inspector at a public inquiry.

Another day, another Vineyard Farms delivery.  But enough cause to reject their plans?

Update:

In their formal rejection notice of the Vineyard Farms plans, Medway Council have once more rolled the dice in VF’s favour. Their stated reasons given for rejection were:

“The scale and nature of the proposed development would result in a significant increase in additional activity within the Bush Valley, which would constitute a severe adverse impact and a direct loss of the currently undeveloped tranquillity and wildness of the AONB. It would also lead to the erosion of the rural character and uniqueness of the community of the Upper Bush Conservation Area and the wider Parish of Cuxton, contrary to Policies BNE12, BNE14, and BNE32 of the Medway Local Plan 2003 and paragraphs 177, 197 and 201 of the National Planning Policy Framework 2021…”

No mention whatsoever of the protection of Green Belt land. No mention of the impact of traffic upon Cuxton and Bush Road. Both were heavily debated at the planning meeting, and yet neither argument made it as a formal reason for refusal of planning permission. 

Even now, it appears that Medway Council want to push the Vineyard Farms proposals through the public inquiry. By omitting any reference to the most powerful cases against VF plans, they have strengthened VF’s hand and severely weakened that of the objectors.

To me, the key argument is the “inappropriate” nature of the development. By framing the debate around the AONB and conservation area considerations only, Medway Council have ensured that the much more powerful arguments around NPPF protections for green belt won't get prominence in any Public Inquiry.

I have no doubt that Vineyard Farms, with their virtually infinite financial resources provided by their billionaire tax-exile owner, will be looking to field a team of highly expensive legal advisors at the public inquiry. Given the likely costs, Medway Council can't just roll over, and will have put up a bit of a token fight to avoid a hefty costs award and so will have to do the same. 

Opponents of the scheme simply cannot afford the same scale of legal representation, which would be the only way to ensure that green belt protection arguments could be properly presented at a public inquiry. And given the likely magnitude of costs, could they afford to lose? 

Of course not. They have been effectively silenced by the size of VF's chequebook and Medway Council. 

To reiterate ad-nauseum, Paragraphs 147-149 of the National Planning Policy Framework state that:

147. Inappropriate development is, by definition, harmful to the Green Belt and should not be approved except in very special circumstances.

148. When considering any planning application, local planning authorities should ensure that substantial weight is given to any harm to the Green Belt. ‘Very special circumstances’ will not exist unless the potential harm to the Green Belt by reason of inappropriateness, and any other harm resulting from the proposal, is clearly outweighed by other considerations.

149. A local planning authority should regard the construction of new buildings as inappropriate in the Green Belt.

Vineyard Farms have been pushing the line that their restaurant complex is an “agricultural building” because a stated exception to paragraph 149 is “buildings for agriculture”.

They claim that as 92% of the KWV’s floor area is given over to wine manufacturing, the whole building must be an agricultural one. This is a nonsensical, "the biggest bit defines the whole" piece-of-shite argument. For example, 92% of a human’s DNA is identical to that of a monkey...

Danger! Vineyard Farms/Foster & Partners logic at work...

80% of the building’s staff are needed to support the 8% that they say comprises the restaurant etc. That shows you where the emphasis of the operation is.  As does all of the glossy documentation furnished by the building’s designers, Foster and Partners.

They have put forward dubious “legal precedents” to fog the issue and to try and justify the laughable proposition that adding a restaurant, café, wine bar and visitor’s centre tourist attraction to the roof of their wine factory to create the £30m Foster & Partners Xanadu still somehow equates with a cow shed, farm shop or a barn.  These "precedents" have to be looked at in detail and rebuffed.

They claim that they need the KWV to process their wine, but ask them to take out the “touristy” bits and they then claim that such a thing would not meet their business needs, which surely gives the lie to the “agricultural needs” argument.

They refuse to countenance a remote winery on a nearby business park, despite the complete absence of infrastructure in the green field/green belt site they want to build on, such as ease of access, power, water, drainage etc., and even though it would eliminate the need for the commercial traffic needed to deliver bottles and production consumables etc. to pass along little Bush Road. They use a specious “quality” argument to gain-say this obvious alternative to building on a green-belt AONB. 

No reasonable person could possibly think that the KWV is an “appropriate” development for green belt land, let alone a development that represents “very special circumstances”, Foster-built or not.

It is essential that the planning inspector in charge of any inquiry gets to consider these all of these arguments, but by their wording of the formal refusal notice, Medway Council have side-stepped them. 

Vineyard Farms have, in effect, already won.

All we can do is write to the Planning Inspector as "interested parties" and present our arguments as best we can.  

But I don't think anyone will be reading them...