Condition 10: the Cooling Road highway works

Medway’s consultation periods on MC/26/1722 and MC/26/1723 ended on 1 October 2026 and on MC/26/1719, MC/26/1720, MC/26/1721 and MC/26/1724 on 2 October 2026. On 2 October Medway’s register recorded forty-five comments across the six, all of them objections: nine on MC/26/1722, eight on MC/26/1723 and seven on each of the other four. None had been decided. Medway’s own target dates for deciding them are 2 and 3 November 2026. A comment can still count while an application is undecided. MC/26/1809, the Town Road signage under condition 13, is open until 14 October.

Medway has published consultation periods on all six applications validated on 7 and 8 September 2026. Comments on MC/26/1722 and MC/26/1723 close on 1 October 2026; on MC/26/1719, MC/26/1720, MC/26/1721 and MC/26/1724 they close on 2 October 2026. Each period runs for 21 days, which is what the group’s covering letter of 9 September asked for. One of the six had not been picked up here before. MC/26/1719 asks Medway to approve the travel plan required by condition 15; its file holds an application form and a 26-page travel plan by the consultancy DHA, marked ‘Draft’ on its cover. The group has since objected to it; see the notice above. MC/26/1721, which had nothing on its file on 9 September, now has an application form and four drawings. Twelve applications on the Church Street land are now undetermined.

Six pages, in plain English, on what has happened to the Church Street site in the last week and what it means for the village. In two days Medway took in five more applications. The group has read all of them and objected to all of them. One of them, MC/26/1721, has no documents on the register at all, so residents are being invited to comment on something nobody can read. The noise report submitted on another dates its own survey to 2056 and still has the letters X and Y where the temperature should be. The air quality one offers £175,000 of car chargers at £750 each, which buys 233 and a third houses on an application for 250. The issue also sets out the one thing worth knowing above all others: nothing can lawfully start on that site yet, because condition 9 covers site clearance and nobody has ever applied to discharge it. There is a posting calendar at the back and a short note on how to comment without being an expert.

Five objections were filed with Medway on 9 September 2026, one to each application, with a covering letter raising what they have in common. On MC/26/1720 the air quality statement calculates nothing: it carries a figure across from January 2022, when Medway’s own guidance says the latest Defra costs should always be used and Defra has updated them twice since and it then counts against that figure electric vehicle charge points the Building Regulations require anyway. On MC/26/1721 there was nothing on the register to read at all. On MC/26/1723 the register advertises works to ‘town roads’ while the condition and every drawing say Cooling Road. On MC/26/1722 the applicant seeks to discharge a condition naming four highway works on details for one of them, on drawings that offer the drainage to Kent County Council, which has had no highway function here since 1998. On MC/26/1724 the noise report dates its own survey to 2056, still carries the letters X and Y where the temperature should be and recommends discharging two conditions nobody has applied for. The covering letter asks Medway to record on any decision notice that approval confers no right to start work of any kind, because condition 9, the construction environmental management plan, has never even been applied for and covers site clearance.

Medway validated four further applications to discharge conditions on the Church Street permission on 7 and 8 September 2026: MC/26/1720 on air quality, MC/26/1721 and MC/26/1722 on highway works and MC/26/1724 on noise. Internal target dates are 2 and 3 November. MC/26/1721 was validated on 7 September and its documents tab is empty — no application form, no covering letter, no drawing — while the other three all carry documents. Residents are invited to comment on an application whose contents have not been published. Ten applications on this land are now undetermined and on Medway’s own register only three of the 54 conditions have ever been discharged: condition 5, condition 6 and condition 53. Correction, 11 September 2026: there were six applications, not four. MC/26/1723, on the Cooling Road improvements, was validated on 7 September and found by the group on 9 September; MC/26/1719, on the travel plan, was validated on 7 September and found on 11 September. That made twelve undetermined applications on this land, not ten.