Tunbridge Wells Borough Council is to pull out of a partnership with two other councils over concerns that it was not working.

The borough signed up to being part of the Mid Kent Planning Support Service, alongside Maidstone and Swale borough councils, in June last year.

But the service, which deals with the administration of planning applications, rather than their determination which was still carried out locally, immediately hit problems.

Within a month, the new service’s manager Ryan O’Connell had to issue a public apology for the poor service and the lengthy delays everyone was experiencing, blaming “technical difficulties.”

The borough found that in the year before the merger, it was registering 87% of its applications within the guideline of five days, but in the year after the merger, that had fallen fell to 34%.

Furthermore, the scheme which had been expected to save the borough around £74,000 a year, actually cost an extra £70,000 in the first year, which was still rising.

Later an investigation by the Mid Kent Audit Service found there had been serious flaws with the management of the scheme and said it had been a “mistake” to go live with the scheme when they did.

Extracting Tunbridge Wells from the contract comes at a cost. The council has had to agree to meet not only its own costs of restoring a local service, but also the costs incurred by the other boroughs, including possible staff redundancies. The total is estimated to be around £150,000, of which £70,000 is to cover redundancy payments. The council said that money would be recouped within two years by saving an estimated saving of £94,000 a year in annual running costs.

Cllr Alan McDemott, the cabinet member for planning, said the issue was not just about cost but about offering a “quality service” to the borough.

Maidstone council, which runs the joint service, insisted that the initial wrinkles had been smoothed out and the service was now meeting its targets - but that has come too late for Tunbridge Wells.