A new government at Westminster has caused at least one local authority to delay work on its Local Plan.

Tonbridge and Malling council has already had one iteration of its Local Plan - submitted in 2019 - rejected by government planning inspectors for allegedly failing to properly consult with neighbouring boroughs.

Now it says it will halt work on developing a new plan until announcements about the new Labour government’s planning policy made in the King’s Speech to parliament yesterday (Wednesday) have been fully detailed and understood.

The new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had previously announced her intention “to take the urgent action needed to fix our planning system” and said there would be changes made to the National Planning Policy Framework - the government’s over-arching planning guide to which all local authorites must adhere - before the end of this month.

Tonbridge and Malling is mid-way through developing its Local Plan which will serve as a blueprint for how the borough develops between now and the 2040s.

The plan sets out locations where new homes can be built, along with a range of policies on environmental protections and safeguards for areas and assets of historic importance.

But given the significance of the changes that Labour is proposing, the council said it must assess the implications before moving forward.

Matt Boughton is the Conservative leader of the council. Speaking ahead of the King’s Speech he told his colleagues: “I am incredibly worried about the government’s new direction.

“As a local planning authority, we hold very dearly the levers that we’ve got to control development in order to make sure that our communities don’t get overburdened, in order to make sure that we can deliver the infrastructure that we need with new development.

“And any more central control in that planning process is going to make life that much harder for local authorities like Tonbridge and Malling to deliver on the housing growth that we need and our residents expect.

“We’re hearing lots about building even more homes than have been built over the course of a parliament and this is where we need the government to remember places like Tonbridge and Maling borough council.

“We need them to listen and to recognise that the answer is not that they, in a very top-down way, can simply dump tens of thousands of houses on our doorstep without any sort of consent from us at all.”

In the meantime, Tonbridge and Malling is still without an adopted Local Plan, which - even under the terms of the existing National Planning Policy Framework - leaves it very little ability to reject new planning applications.