A council has approved controversial plans for thousands of homes over the coming years despite fears of the borough becoming “another Milton Keynes”.

Maidstone council has approved its plan for local housebuilding up until 2038 - with more than 17,000 new homes included across the borough.

At a special meeting of the full council last night, protestors gathered outside Maidstone Town Hall to oppose the plans.

Liz Meek, of Sandway near Lenham, attended to oppose the plans for a 5,000 home “garden settlement” called Heathlands.

“Basically it’s going to be a housing estate in the middle of nowhere, with all the traffic of 5,000 houses, 10,000 cars going to go on the M20,” she told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

She said the countryside near Lenham Heath is “beautiful and full of historic and archaeological traces from Romans and the Neolithic and Stone Age onwards.

“But they’re just going to build over the whole lot and ruin it and make it into another Milton Keynes.”

“Everything about Lenham Heath is not suitable for 5,000 houses really but I can see their problem in that everywhere else in this borough isn’t suitable either.”

Locals have been campaigning against the plans under the banner Save Our Heath Lands (SOHL) for several years.

Under the local plan, another “garden settlement” is proposed at Lidsing.

Currently a hamlet near Boxley and the border with Medway, under the plans it will be “an exemplar urban extension containing 2,000 new homes.”

Ward councillor for Boxley on MBC and Bredhurst parish council chair Cllr Vanessa Jones (Ind) was one of the founders of Against Lidsing Garden Development.

“For people in Boxley ward particularly it will absolutely crucify our ward, it will be absolutely devastating,” she said outside the meeting.

Cllr John Britt, chairman of Lenham Parish Council, echoed similar sentiments, saying: “It’s a bit David and Goliath but we all know how that ended up didn’t we.

“We know that people need houses but they need to be the right houses in the right places,” he added.

Lenham resident Lesley Feakes said: “It just doesn’t seem the right place for the housing.

“They don’t need to build them right bang in the middle of the countryside do they?”

MBC’s cabinet had already met on March 19 to recommend approving the plan to the full council, saying that if they left it beyond March 30 the evidence used to assess housing numbers would expire and place the authority at risk of speculative development.

However, that afternoon only hours before the cabinet meeting, Kent County Council’s head of growth, environment, and transport Simon Jones wrote to MBC encouraging them not to adopt the local plan.

In the letter he cited the need for new schools and the impact of the scale of development on school places and road networks.

At the full council meeting there were two attempts to amend the proposals.

Cllr Stuart Jeffrey (Green) proposed an amendment to delay the vote until after the full local council election on May 2, but it was defeated.

Cllr Tony Harwood (Lib Dem) then proposed to defer it until no later than April 18 to allow MBC to respond to the county council’s concerns, but this was also defeated.

Council leader Cllr David Burton (Con) said to members that “there are some people that really just don’t want this plan.

“You cannot change it now - it’s locked by the Inspector, it’s take it or leave it,” he stressed.

When local authorities finalise their local plans the government’s housing inspector gets the final say on whether they are valid.

When authorities don’t have an in-date local plan or can’t show that they have enough land earmarked for housing for five years, they have to “presume in favour” of “sustainable development.”

In practice this means that the council has to accept developments in places which it would rather refuse as they don’t have a local plan to govern where houses are put.

A document circulated at the meeting by the administration said that “from April 1 2024 our calculations suggest that we will have less than four years’ housing land supply”.

After over two hours of debate MBC voted to adopt the local plan with 31 votes in favour and 21 votes against.

Speaking afterwards, Cllr Burton added: “It is never an easy thing to spatially plan for this quantum of housing.

“All national political parties want to boost the housebuilding numbers, with others wanting more than we currently have at present.

“We have worked hard in a cross-party way, over the last four years to build the evidence and put together the land that was offered to us by landowners, to formulate our spatial strategy. It is a strategy designed to maximise infrastructure delivery, something that was sorely lacking as a result of the last local plan and the old dispersal strategy.

“It is important to remember that a Local Plan sets out where development will be permitted, but also where it will not be allowed.”

Cllr Paul Cooper, cabinet member for planning, infrastructure and development, said: “Another important factor in adopting this local plan is the policies that this plan gives us and our residents.

“We have put in a requirement for a 20% biodiversity net gain on all new developments, differing from the National Planning Policy Framework requirement of 10% and a requirement for much more greenspace within development sites.

“We have worked hard to make sure that we have a suite of planning policies that can be used into the future to shape our borough.

“It is positive place-making and the independent planning inspector said as much.”