Tonbridge and Malling Local Plan Vote: 20,106 Homes

Tonbridge and Malling councillors decide on Thursday whether to publish the Local Plan that will set where every new home in the borough goes until 2042. Full Council meets at 7.30pm on 3 September. It is item 9 on the agenda.

If they approve it, a six-week public consultation opens on Thursday 10 September and closes at midnight on Sunday 25 October. That is the last chance to comment before the plan goes to a government inspector.

The number has moved again. The officer report puts the borough’s local housing need at 20,106 homes over the plan period, or 1,117 a year. Earlier stages of the plan were based on 19,746.

Behind the vote sits a problem the council has been raising with ministers all year. In December, the borough’s water company told it in writing that it could not supply growth on this scale.

What South East Water said

South East Water responded to the council’s consultation on 17 December 2025. Its letter is published in full as Annex 3 to Thursday’s report. The relevant passage is blunt:

“Specifically, in the Tonbridge and Malling area, where we currently lack available headroom in our supplies, we would be unable to accommodate any growth exceeding our WRMP24 forecast assumptions throughout the entire planning period.”

The company added that it would not know what new supplies, transfers or demand reduction were needed until its next statutory water resources plan. On its own timetable, that means a new demand forecast by spring 2027 and proposed fixes a year after that, in spring 2028. The plan the council is being asked to publish runs to 2042.

South East Water’s registered office is on Rocfort Road in Snodland, inside the borough.

What happened next

The council did not drop the plan. It escalated. The report and its annexes set out a year of it:

• 16 January and 11 February 2026: the Leader of the Council, Cllr Matt Boughton, writes to Matthew Pennycook MP, the minister responsible for local plans.
• 21 April 2026: the Leader, the Director of Planning and the Planning Policy Manager attend the government’s Water Delivery Taskforce at Defra to set out the supply problem in detail.
• 2 July 2026: the council writes again to Defra and the housing ministry, explaining the urgency.
• 6 August 2026: Defra and the housing ministry reply jointly.

That reply, from Martin Woodhead, Defra’s Deputy Director for Water Infrastructure Delivery, is Annex 4. It does two things at once.

It accepts the problem is real. The government, it says, “recognises the serious concerns about SEW’s performance, including repeated supply interruptions, and the impact this has had on communities and confidence in planned growth”. It records that Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency have identified “significant and pervasive failings” in the company’s operational resilience, governance and incident response, and that Ofwat has secured legally binding undertakings including a £30.5 million remediation package, funded by the company and its shareholders.

Then it stops short of a guarantee. The letter says there is “a credible pathway to water supply for the plan”, while “recognising the remaining uncertainties and the limits of the reassurance Defra and MHCLG are able to provide”. The officer report puts it more plainly still: government “cannot provide absolute assurance regarding future delivery”.

The Environment Agency has advised that the additional supply options are unlikely to carry unacceptable environmental risk.

The water rules in the plan itself

The borough sits in an area the Environment Agency classifies as under serious water stress. Two draft policies respond to it:

• Policy INF1 requires an applicant to show that enough utility capacity exists, or can be funded and delivered in time. Development that cannot be supported by the necessary water supply and wastewater infrastructure, and where the impact cannot be mitigated, “will be refused planning permission”.
• Policy CC7 sets water consumption targets of 90 litres per person per day on larger developments and 100 litres on smaller ones, alongside rainwater harvesting, greywater recycling and water-efficient fittings. For comparison, South East Water’s own ambition is to get average household use down to 110 litres a day by 2050.

Where the homes would go

The draft plan allocates sites across the borough. These are the ten largest, by net dwellings:

Three things are worth pulling out of that list:

• Borough Green is the biggest single change in the plan. Its allocation is 2,000 homes plus 33,200 square metres of employment floorspace. The village currently sits on a single-carriageway road network and a two-platform station.
• Tonbridge takes 1,500 homes northeast of the town, plus 408 at southwest Tonbridge, 394 at Coblands Nursery and Little Trench Farm on Trench Road, 159 north of Priory Road, 122 at Sovereign Way North, 122 at The River Centre, 76 by the Vauxhall Inn, 56 at the Angel Centre and 12 at Vale Road car park.
• One of the five largest sites is already out of the council’s hands. The 1,300 homes east of Kiln Barn Road and west of Hermitage Lane are the scheme councillors were minded to refuse in July, which the Secretary of State has since called in for her own decision. The officer report argues that a minded-to-refuse resolution does not, by itself, make the allocation unsound.

The rest of the top ten fall outside Tonbridge itself: 1,300 at Broadwater Farm in Kings Hill, 1,300 north of Holborough Lakes in Snodland, 938 at Aylesford Lakes, 602 off Stocks Green Road in Hildenborough, 435 at Bunyards on Beaver Road in Allington, and 422 between Court Lane and Cemetery Lane in Hadlow.

Green Belt, roads and jobs

Green Belt. About 71% of the borough is Green Belt, and much of the rest carries National Landscape, flood risk, ancient woodland or heritage constraints. The council’s evidence concludes that exceptional circumstances exist to change Green Belt boundaries in some specific locations only. A new Green Gap policy would protect land between West Malling, Kings Hill and the Medway Gap from the settlements merging into one another.

Roads. A transport assessment by Jacobs modelled 30 key junctions. It found 13 that need mitigation because of the plan’s growth, and identified 21 sites with potential to shift journeys to walking, cycling and public transport. The report is candid that the plan cannot fix congestion that already exists.

Jobs. The borough’s employment evidence sets a minimum requirement of 372,000 square metres of floorspace between 2024 and 2042. The plan allocates land for about 241,786 square metres, with completed schemes and existing permissions counted alongside it. Officers describe this as “the maximum realistic level of employment provision that can currently be identified”.

What happens if they vote no

The report is unusually direct about this. The government’s transitional arrangements require plans of this kind to be submitted by the end of December 2026. There is no time left to pause, rework and still meet that date.

If councillors decide the plan is not ready:

• the borough would have to restart the whole process under the new plan-making system;
• the government “could then exercise its discretion and intervene to direct the Council to submit the Plan as it stands”;
• speculative planning applications on sites the council has not chosen become more likely, because there is still no up-to-date plan to refuse them against.

The plan’s own risk register, published as Annex 6, scores “risk of government intervention if a plan is not progressed” at the maximum 25 out of 25 before mitigation, and 20 after. Missing the December deadline scores 20 before mitigation and 15 after.

There is a quieter risk in there too. The planning policy team has been working on a local plan since 2019 without a break, several posts are filled by agency staff, and the report warns that keeping the team together “is likely to be impacted by the direction of travel following consideration of this report”.

What it means for you

• If you want to comment, the window is 10 September to midnight on 25 October, and only if councillors approve publication on Thursday. Regulation 19 is a narrower stage than the ones before it: representations are meant to address whether the plan is legally compliant and “sound”, not whether you like it.
• Read the chapter that covers your area first. The site allocations are in Chapter 14, and the council has published each chapter as a separate PDF because the full plan is a 32MB file.
• The plan starts to count immediately. Once published under Regulation 19, it becomes a material consideration in planning decisions, and its weight grows as it moves towards adoption.
• Thursday’s meeting is a public one. The agenda, the officer report and all six annexes are already online.

Our Tonbridge planning news page tracks the plan’s timetable and the schemes already approved. Council tax bands for the borough are on our council tax page.

Sources

• Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, agenda item 9, Council, 3 September 2026, and the officer report by the Director of Planning, Housing and Regulatory Services, for the recommendations, the 20,106 figure, the consultation dates, the Green Belt, transport and employment evidence and the risks.
• Annex 3, South East Water’s response to the Regulation 18 consultation, dated 17 December 2025, for the quoted passage and the WRMP29 timetable.
• Annex 4, letter from Martin Woodhead, Deputy Director for Water Infrastructure Delivery at Defra, dated 6 August 2026, for the regulators’ findings and the £30.5 million Ofwat undertakings.
• Annex 6, the Local Plan risk register, for the risk scores.
• Chapter 14 of the draft Regulation 19 Local Plan, Policy A1, for the site allocations and yields.
• Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council, Local Plan and its news release Final draft Local Plan published for council decision, 25 August 2026.