THE proposed KIG road-rail depot on the outskirts of Maidstone is the "wrong plan, in the wrong place, with the wrong motives".

Sean Furey, the Kent deputy director of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), has said the proposed 250-acre depot is an example of how not to combat climate change.

Meanwhile, campaigners have released a photograph they claim shows just how much the KIG depot will overshadow the countryside at Bearsted and Hollingbourne.

Their concerns echo those of Mr Furey, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a former senior Environment Agency officer, who said: "What the developers are trying to push is the idea of getting freight off roads and on to rail, which is laudable.

"But if you look at the detail, it is not going to deliver the sustainability. It is going to be such an inefficient use of land."

Mr Furey, who is organising a ground-breaking climate change conference in Maidstone in February, said the way land is used will be one of the key environmental questions in the future.

He said: "We have only a finite amount of land. Yet we are told that we need to find more land for houses as the population increases, more land for agriculture to feed people, more land for bio-fuels to save the environment, and more land for wildlife and nature."

Meanwhile the actual amount of land may reduce, he warned, as higher seas and floods threaten to change the shape of Kent's coastline.

Mr Furey said that the current approach is not coordinated enough and said the KIG plan is typical.

"That land has a lot of wildlife and is also useful for growing food – and we are probably going to need that," he said.

"It is the wrong plan, in the wrong place, with the wrong motives."

The aerial picture was arranged by the campaign group StopKIG. An interpretation of KIG's eight warehouses, covering a total of 374,000 square metres, is superimposed.

Val Springett, of StopKIG, said: "It may not be 100 per cent accurate, but it is our best guess using the information in the plans."

She said: "It is a massive blot on the landscape."

See this week's Kent Messenger for a full report.