A borough council has voted to oppose a controversial application for 950 homes around a small village – but only for the time being.

Tonbridge and Malling council’s Area 3 planning committee met to consider the proposal from Trenport for 950 homes at Bushey Wood in Eccles.

Councillors already knew that the decision had been taken away from them after Trenport lodged an appeal for non-determination. The application will now be decided by a government inspector at a public inquiry.

But the council still had to determine what it’s position would have been, so that planning offcers know what stance to take at the appeal hearing scheduled for this autumn.

Officers were recommending the plan be approved, but just for a while it looked as though members might go against their advice after passionate appeals from members of the public objecting to the scheme.

Steve Beadle of the Eccles Action Group said residents had “lost trust” in Trenport to deliver on their promised mitigation measures, after the company’s failure to build a promised doctors’ surgery on their nearby Peters Village development, and the collapse of the promised bus improvement scheme there.

Another action group member, Aaron Ludlow, urged councilors to send Trenport a message that they must put residents first.

He said: “We are being used as a pawn in their game,” – a reference to Trenport allegedlly saying it wouldn’t provide the doctors’ surgery at Peters Village until the (in theory unrelated) Bushey Wood application had been passed.

Cllr David Davis (Con), who represents Aylesford North and North Downs, gave a lengthy and detailed speech explaining why he thought the application was “fundamentally flawed” and why he couldn’t vote for it.

He pointed out that no part of the orginal brownfield site of the Burham Brick Company was included in the current application area; that it would instead involve concreting over Grade 2 agricultural land and at a time of heightened food insecurity and record food inflation; that the local roads were “quirky, single carriageway roads” with no chance for two large vehicles to pass simultateonsly, and that no account had been taken of Alex Hill on Rochester Road, Burham, which was very steep and impassible for some vehicles in bad weather.

He said that the opening of Peters Bridge in September 2015 had already increased traffic through the village from 1,000 vehicles a week to 25,000 a week.

He was concerned about the lost bus services and feared that the donation Trenport was being required to make would not be enough to restore the buses beyond five years.

He was also concerned that half the Eccles village allotments were to be moved to a new spot with no thought for the years of work the allotment holders had put into improving their soil, and also said that the division of the allotments would lead to a loss of community.

A similar issue applied, he said, to the sports pitch which Trenport was proposing to resite on land that the villagers knew as “the quagmire.”

He was concerned too about moving the school away from the centre of the village and finally said: ”Everything the applicant has done has been to cut costs.”

He criticised the scheme for only providing 30% affordable housing instead of the normal 40%, even though Trenport was building on a greenfield site – which was cheaper.

In response, the council’s head of planning James Bailey said Trenport had provided a feasibility study as to why only 30% was achieveable and he pointed out the borough had only a 3.22 year land supply for housing, whereas the government required it to have five years.

The site was not in an AONB, not in the Greenbelt and not in a flood risk zone; KCC, the highways authority, had not objected on highways grounds, and none of the statutory consultees had objected other than National Highways, which said it had not received enough information from Trenport to determine the strategic effect of the application on the M2 at J3 for Blue Bell Hill, and the M20 at J6 for Maidstone.

National Highways had advised that the application should not be approved until at least August 15, when it hoped to be in a position to make a ruling.

Cllr Alex McDermott (Con) also spoke against the application, also citing how Trenport had failed to keep promises at the nearby Peters Village site.

He said: “They have not provided the agreed surgery; they have not opened the agreed community centre; they have not provided promised play equipment and they have not got Peters Bridge adopted by KCC.”

He was particularly critical of the lack of GP provision as a result of recent and proposed development, saying: “This is a matter of life or death for some people.”

However the proposal that eventually emerged after more than two hours of discussion was far from an outright condemnation of the application.

Cllr Robert Cannon (Con), Aylesford and South Ditton, said: “We need to focus on the grounds of objection that we can defend at the appeal; we can’t vote with our hearts.”

He proposed that the council object to the application on the grounds that National Highways had not received sufficient information to determine the effect on the strategic road network, but with the proviso that should National Highways later declare itself satisfied, then the director of planning would have delegated permission to withdraw the council’s objection.

His motion was passed by affirmation, without a formal vote being held.