Condition 32: surface-water drainage

Six pages, in plain English. The drainage scheme under MC/26/1459 was approved on 15 September and the committee has asked Medway to look at it again. Eleven applications on the Church Street land are still undecided. The group’s objections of 9 September to MC/26/1720 to MC/26/1724 are not yet on Medway’s public file, though all five can be read here. The recreation ground closes on 24 September and six more close on 1 and 2 October.

Medway discharged condition 32 on 15 September 2026, approving the surface-water drainage scheme for every phase of the Church Street development. The decision was taken by officers, thirteen days before Medway’s own target date. Its notice gives a single reason: that the details are acceptable. It mentions none of the twelve objections made on the application. No officer report, consultee response or habitats screening has been published with it. Condition 32 was one of the conditions stopping development from starting. It no longer is. Others still are, including the construction management plan under condition 9.

On 16 September 2026 the group’s committee wrote to the case officer for MC/26/1459, copied to Medway’s Chief Planning Officer and Head of Development Management, Natural England, the parish council and the three ward councillors. The letter says the group could find no timetable for the drainage, no maintenance plan and no named owner for the basins, all of which condition 32 asks for. It says nothing on the file shows that the effect on the Ramsar site was screened or that the Environment Agency was consulted, although the developer’s own ground engineers advised that it must be. It asks Medway to publish its record of the decision, to answer twelve questions in writing and to say by 30 September whether it will look at the decision again. Residents have no right of appeal against a planning decision, so the letter asks Medway itself to reconsider.

The group has filed its formal representation with Medway’s Principal Planning Officer, copied to the case officer for MC/26/1459, to Natural England and to the parish council. It does not seek to reopen the principle of development. It asks Medway to decide expressly whether each of the five decisions authorises the project, or a phase of it, to proceed — and if so, to carry out and publish the habitats assessment before granting them.

The ground investigation the applicant filed says shallow soakaways into the chalk are not a viable option for disposing of surface water. Medway’s Strategic Flood Risk Assessment records that ditches across Cliffe Marshes drain into the Thames. So the practical question on MC/26/1459 is simple: where does the surface water go and does that route reach the protected wetland?