Where has all the money gone?

That was the question being asked by residents this month after learning that despite all the house-building that has taken place along Hermitage Lane, Maidstone, in the last few years, the community seemed no nearer to getting a re-design of the Fountain Lane/A26 Tonbridge Road junction.

The junction is a notorious bottleneck for traffic, which is growing worse every year as the traffic volumes along Hermitage Lane increase with each new development.

Initially there was a delay because there was no agreement on what could be done. A total of nine attempts at re-drawing the junction failed to find support in one quarter or another. But eventually KCC, the highways authority, did settle on a solution - a design that involves a double roundabout instead of the existing traffic lights and would require the purchase and demolition of the popular Taj Barming Indian restaurant.

The junction has at last made its way onto KCC's to-do list of proposed junctions improvements; the hold-up now is simply a lack of money.

It is estimate the scheme will cost £3.2m - another figure that is sure to rise with every month of delay.

Earlier this month, at the instigation of Heath Ward's Cllr Peter Holmes (Con), Maidstone council agreed to approach Taylor Wimpey, the developer building 181 homes at The Peafield site in Barming, to ask if the firm would agree to switch £246,459 it had agreed as part of its planning permission to pay towards setting up a bus service to serve the estate to financing the Fountain Lane junction scheme. Cllr Holmes described the planned bus service as a "white elephant" that was not wanted by local residents.

This came only nine months after the council granted Taylor Wimpey planning permission when at that time the authority had considered the bus services was an essential mitigation for the extra housing.

This set us wondering...

What else have the developers been asked to contribute to, instead of the Fountain Lane junction?

It is normal for builders of large housing numbers to be asked to make a Section 106 agreement, a legal contract to contribute towards various services in order to offset the extra pressure their housing scheme would place on the community infrastructure.

Some of the monies have to be paid to the county council, some to the borough council. And along Hermitage Lane there are two boroughs involved: Maidstone, and Tonbridge and Malling.

They are always for specific tasks that have to be related to the development in some way - and the money cannot be used for something else without the consent of all parties.

There have been six major housing developments approved along Hermitage Lane or in its immediate vicinity in the past few years, providing for a total of 1,919 new houses or flats (not yet all built.)

The developers have been asked to dip into their pockets for a total of £19.8m.

Payments have been promised towards services as diverse as providing adult social care (£52,823), to libraries (£104,092) to improving a bridleway (£57,600).

There was £111,480 towards improving public rights of way, and £18,330 to youth services.

Sports fields, play areas and contributions towards off-site open space provision took up just over £2m.

But by far the biggest sums demanded have been for primary education (£6.5m), secondary education (£5.86m), and road improvements (£2.98m.)

Other transport improvements have included pedestrian crossing provision (£48,980), a cycle path (£22,000) and £50,000 towards rail station improvements.

A total of £701,159 has been earmarked for buses.

Healthcare provision amounts to £1.2m.

Within the money set aside for highway improvements, KCC has had three schemes in mind: the Fountain Lane junction, a new roundabout at Coldharbour on the A20 London Road, and improvements to J5 (Aylesford) on the M20.

The money specifically allocated to those three is £621,000, £676,00 and £49,980 respectively.

However, there was an additional £1,638,000 where the money was available to spend on any of those projects. The Coldharbour roundabout has been KCC's favoured objective, because that was the first one with an agreed design.

It is important to remember that KCC and the borough councils will not yet have received all that money.

It depends on the wording of the agreement.

Some payments have to be made up front, as soon as constructions starts, but many are phased to be paid in stages as the housing is completed and occupied - which could be years down the line.

In addition, once the local authority has the money in its hands, it has to spend it on the designated task within a set number of years. This too varies, mostly its within 10 years, sometimes five, occasionally three.

If the council has not spent the cash in the designated time-frame, the developer can demand to have the money back.

There is one other large application in the wings that was unexpectedly refused planning permission quite recently - that was the Croudace scheme for 330 homes south of Barming Station.

KCC had been hoping to get a nice contribution from that towards the Fountain Lane junction.

Croudace has appealed against the refusal and may possibly still win permission.
In which case, the Section 106 money will come eventually, but the figures have yet to be agreed and it won't arrive for some years.

Meanwhile the latest application to be submitted, is from Barrett David Wilson Homes for 435 dwellings at Bunyards Far, Beaver Road, Allington.

The application before Tonbridge and Malling Council (Ref No 22/00409) has yet to be determined and no Section 106 agreement has yet been drawn up.

But KCC has set out its stall saying it will require £1.2m to go towards the Fountain Lane junction.

It also wants £406,725 towards bus service enhancements.

'Highways should be the priority'

Angela Poletti is the chairman of the New Allington Action Group (NAAG). She said: "Sorting out the highways issues is actually fundamental to all these applications. It should be the priority before everything else.

"We seem to be in a Catch 22 situation. KCC wants the new junctions built before any more housing is commenced, but the developers wont contribute until they have permission to build still more homes."

But there is not complete agreement that building new road junctions is necessarily the solution to the traffic congestion.

Chris Passmore of MERLin (The Medway Ecological Riverine Link) said: "What is needed, rather than throwing huge sums at junction improvements, is more money spent on improving active travel links.

"Cycling around West Maidstone at the moment is hazardous to say the least. If we had more cycle-ways and footpaths, we could could get people out of their cars for those ultra-short journeys and reduce traffic that way.

Mr Passmore said: "Parents are too worried at the moment to let their children cycle to school."

Similarly, Cllr Paul Harper (Lab), from Fant ward, said he would not have chosen to divert the money allocated for buses to the junction. He said: "Without investing in alternatives to the car we will never solve the chronic congestion and air pollution in Maidstone."

Cllr Peter Holmes said: "We need houses (there is a national shortage) and affordable housing for local people, but we need the infrastructure too."

He argued that ultimately the best way of ensuring that happened would be for Maidstone and all other Kent towns to change to a unitary authority.

He said: "This would enable all the issues to be dealt with by one authority in conjunction with their planning applications."

He said: "Unfortunately at the moment there is for some reason a disparity and disconnection between infrastructure (KCC) and planning (MBC)."

He agreed with Cllr Haper thatthere was a nee to invest in alternatives to car travel. He said: "This means in the west of Maidstone securing the much talked about cycle lane along Hermitage Lane, that will provide safe access for cyclists to Barming Station which is seeing increased secure cycle storage and also linking into the South Aylesford retail park."

But he said: "Importantly though we must be allowing for a choice of travel options by residents, the days of pushing modal shift are gone."

"Councillors are elected to be the voice of the community in the town hall and not the town hall's voice in the community and we need to listen to what our residents want."

KCC’s project manager Barry Stiff said: “Until funding becomes available, it is not possible to predict when the Fountain Lane scheme could be delivered.”

According to KCC, the design for the Fountain Lane junction would "reduce the degree of saturation on all four arms of the junction to 75% at peak times."

But officers have warned that if nothing is done, the congestion would be at "over 100%" on all four arms by 2031.

The proposal is for the existing junction, which has traffic lights, to be turned into a dual roundabout.

The Fountain Lane arm approach would be widened into the land currently occupied by the restaurant to reduce queue lengths for traffic wanting to turn left onto the A26 Tonbridge Road.

The main three-arm roundabout would be situated at the existing junction, with the third arm to the south-west linking to a smaller roundabout which would also have three arms.

The smaller roundabout would not be a complete roundabout as vehicles would not be able to make a right turn movement from A26 Tonbridge Road (West) into Farleigh Road.

Instead, vehicles would need to move through the main roundabout and return to the smaller junction, essentially performing a U-turn.

For pedestrian safety, there would be four signalised pedestrian crossings, one on each of the four approaches to the junction.