Officers recommend 16 houses beside Samuels Towers on land inside the Great Lines wildlife site, four years after the application. Kent Wildlife Trust still objects.

Sixteen houses would be cut into the chalk slope beside the Samuels Towers flats on Longhill Avenue, Chatham, under a scheme Medway Council’s planning officers have recommended for approval after four and a half years.

The land sits inside a designated Local Wildlife Site. Kent Wildlife Trust objected, and has kept its objection through every revision.

Application MC/22/0486 was received on 23 February 2022 and reached the planning committee on 26 August 2026. The council’s register lists the committee date but no decision, because permission depends on a section 106 agreement being signed (Medway Council planning portal).

What is proposed

From the officer report, the scheme is:

  • 16 prefabricated three-bedroom houses, two storeys, in a mix of semi-detached pairs and terraces of three
  • each about 5m wide and 10.5m deep, 5.8m to the eaves and 8.4m to the ridge
  • built partly on the existing Samuels Towers car park and partly on green space, using a cut and fill into the bank
  • retaining walls of roughly 1.2m to 5m in height, to be greened
  • 16 parking spaces plus six visitor spaces for the houses, and 24 rearranged spaces for Samuels Towers

The site is 0.89 hectares. The applicant is Trellick Ltd, with Planning Potential Ltd as agent. Access is the existing one from Longhill Avenue.

The habitat is the sticking point

The site lies within the Great Lines, Gillingham Local Wildlife Site, and holds lowland calcareous grassland, a priority habitat that forms on thin, infertile chalk soils.

Kent County Council’s biodiversity team set out how rare it is. In Kent this grassland is estimated to cover 1,929 hectares, about 0.5% of the county’s surface area, and 32.6% of the county’s resource sits inside Local Wildlife Sites. “Any loss of lowland calcareous grass land could be significant given its conservation status,” the team wrote.

Kent Wildlife Trust objected on the grounds of direct loss of a designated Local Wildlife Site and an overall loss of biodiversity. Its later comments accepted that retaining the remaining calcareous habitat “is a positive improvement”, but it kept the objection and said the site should instead be actively managed to restore it.

Officers do not dispute the harm. Their own planning balance says the proposal “would result in the loss of a designate habitat site” and that “the harm should have significant weight”.

Three things carried it, on the officer report’s own reasoning:

  1. Medway cannot demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, which triggers the tilted balance in paragraph 11(d) of the National Planning Policy Framework.
  2. The emerging Local Plan does not identify the area as a local wildlife site, and does allocate the site for residential development.
  3. The scheme shrank. Houses on the eastern side were removed so the calcareous grassland there could be retained and managed, and the buildings came down from three storeys to two.

The report notes the application predates mandatory biodiversity net gain, so the 10% requirement does not apply to it.

Comparison of the original and revised Longhill Avenue scheme: homes fall from 24 to 16, height from three storeys to two, and the health contribution from 14,427.52 pounds to nothing because the scheme is now under 20 dwellings; the application ran from 23 February 2022 to the planning committee on 26 August 2026, four years and six months
How the Longhill Avenue scheme changed between 2022 and 2026. Graphic by Medway Live from the officer report for application MC/22/0486.

Shrinking the scheme also removed the NHS payment

The developer would pay £186,852.68 in section 106 contributions. The largest items are £101,664.68 for education, split across nursery, primary, secondary and sixth form, and £58,213.60 towards green space improvements in the local area. Smaller sums cover community facilities, libraries, public realm in Chatham town centre, waste, sports at the Strand, and coastal bird protection.

One payment is missing. Officers first sought up to £14,427.52 towards extending or upgrading local health premises, at £901.72 per dwelling. The report then records that “as the proposal is for less than 20 dwellings the health contribution is no longer requested”.

The scheme was 24 homes when the area’s then MP, Rehman Chishti, wrote in support of it. It is now 16.

What objectors said

Seven letters from six objectors were received. Their grounds included:

  • the area is heavily populated already, with fly tipping and antisocial behaviour in the adjacent alleyway
  • heavy demand for parking on narrow streets
  • the site is protected as a landscape and a local wildlife site under the 2003 Local Plan
  • the site is not brownfield, because a tower block car park does not make it urban
  • overlooking of Mount Pleasant, and the effect on long views over Chatham and Luton

On the fly tipping, the applicant’s contamination study found moderate to low risks that can be “mitigated by clearing fly tipped waste as part of the site clearance”, with a watching brief for demolition rubble during reprofiling. Officers want that secured by condition.

The application would normally have been decided by officers. It went to committee because of the number of objections received against the officer recommendation.

One oddity for anyone reading the document: the final section of the report is headed “Conclusions and Reasons for Refusal”, but the text beneath it, and the recommendation at the top, are both for approval.

What it means for you

  • No permission has been issued. It cannot be until the section 106 agreement is completed, and the register currently shows no decision.
  • The grassland survives on the eastern side of the site, and its management would be secured by condition, including a construction plan to stop dust and soil changes degrading it.
  • Samuels Towers parking is rearranged, not reduced, with 24 spaces retained for the flats alongside 22 for the new houses.
  • Read the file yourself. Search MC/22/0486 on the Medway planning portal.
  • Watch the emerging Local Plan. The reason the wildlife designation carried less weight here is that the new plan does not carry it forward, and does allocate the land for housing.

Our guide to planning applications in Medway covers how to comment on schemes near you, and we log outcomes on the Medway planning news page.

Sources