Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has been given a blasting by a Kent local authority over the “negative effects” of the government’s planning policies on its residents.

Ms Rayner, who is the secretary of state for housing communities and local government, has been warned by Maidstone council that while her proposed reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework “may assist with further housing delivery,” they did not address “the broader social, economic and environmental issues that are negatively affecting residents of the county town.”

The council told Ms Rayner that Maidstone had seen a “rapid and unprecedented growth in numbers of new residential properties in recent years.

“This has arisen not just from planned development, but also from significant unplanned conversions of office stock to residential use.”

There have been 650 homes created in this manner since 2017, all focussed in a comparatively small area around the town centre.

The council said: “These conversions lack the amenity space that would have been required under a plan-led system and, crucially, such ‘unplanned’ development does not trigger the requirement for developer contributions, which is placing significant and ongoing pressure on Maidstone’s social infrastructure, including education, health, social care, parks and other green spaces, sports facilities, children’s centres, youth clubs, and parking provision.”

One result of having no developer support was that both Maidstone Borough Council and Kent County Council were struggling to identify both the land and the funding required for a new school to accommodate the increased cohort of school-age children.

Also, because office and retail conversions did not require planning permission, there was no means for the council to insist on high-quality conversions, so there had been a “downward pressure on design quality in a ‘race to the bottom’.”

But on top of that, Maidstone added: “Some of these residential conversions are being purchased and used by councils from London and elsewhere to accommodate people on their housing registers.”

Ms Rayner was told: “This additional pressure on local infrastructure is imposing a negative and unsustainable impact on local health, social care and education services, as well as existing town centre communities, businesses and the visitor economy.”

The council said: “Recently, 140 properties were purchased by one London borough alone, with the intention to acquire a further 150 properties to place their homeless families.

“There are no plans or intention to return these households to their borough.

“We are also acutely aware of significant placements into urban Maidstone by a range of other organisations.

“Only local housing authorities are required by statute to notify the host authority of such placements, and even then, the lack of consistent notification has been repeatedly brought to the government’s attention.

“This makes calculating the actual number of local placements, and thus their support needs, impossible.

“Often Maidstone Borough Council only becomes aware when the unsupported person has a crisis of some sort.”

The council told Ms Rayner that “Maidstone town centre, like many similar towns, is now facing growing concerns with anti-social behaviour, alcohol and substance misuse.

Financial contributions are not even coming close

“A hard core of older street drinkers, conspicuous substance misuse, often linked to underlying mental health conditions, and associated unacceptable behaviours, all risk harming the local economy, by deterring visitor footfall and investment alike.

“A further community safety concern is the presence of high-speed delivery riders and electric bikes, raising safety concerns as they intertwine with pedestrians on our busy streets.

“While we know that only a small percentage of young people engage in crime and anti-social behaviour, we recognise that for some, their numbers can be intimidating.

“Respect, or the lack of it, and an upsurge in high profile animal cruelty and vandalism cases in and around the county town also plays a role in the often unfair perception of all young people.”

The council said: “The very limited amount of new local infrastructure provision and level of financial contributions that is associated with plan-led development is not even coming close to addressing the fundamentally negative quality of life changes impacting Maidstone town centre.”

Maidstone asked for immediate changes in the law to allow it to require Section 106 Payments and to apply Community Infrastructure Levy on all new residential units.

Cllr Tony Harwood (Lib Dem), the cabinet member for planning policy who put his name to the letter, admitted it was “perhaps, less diplomatically framed than usual” but said: “I was born and bred in the town and have observed first-hand many of these too often negative changes.

“Not all towns have seen the same recent malaise as Maidstone, so things can be turned around.

“But we need new freedoms and better policy tools if we are to act decisively to stop the rot.”