The application for 785 dwellings at Manston and the appointments of senior council officers come before Thanet Council committees next week.

I guess we all know that the government have told councils that more houses have to be built and obviously people need places to live. I think it pretty fair to say that over the next few years several thousand new homes will be built in Thanet.

Of course there is the sort out the empty and derelict properties first augment, the snag here is that they are all owned by different people and many of them would be very expensive to sort out if they could be bought by a developer.

There are also a few large plots in towns, like Pleasurama which has got as far as the foundations on sand stage and the Boundary Road gasworks site which has serious industrial contamination issues.

We then have the building out across open land solution, we have prime farmland and probably need to conserve as much as this as we can, the Manston Airport site where soil is thin on top of the chalk and probably wouldn’t be viable as farmland but it looks like the two property developers RiverOak and Discovery Parks will be thrashing this one out.

The one that comes before the planning committee next week is a development on prime farmland, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/documents/s46423/D04.pdf

The other committee meeting next week is General Purposes and they will probably ok the appointment of the council’s new top financial and legal officers, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/documents/s46526/Appointment%20of%20Interim%20Section%20151%20Officer%20and%20Interim%20Monitoring%20Officer.pdf

I guess there is a sense with both of these committees (reading both documents) that they needn’t be there at all and that they are just there to rubber stamp what has already been decided. But I am mindful that with most of the new committee members lacking experience the council’s radar, while not being completely turned off may be running high enough for something fairly large to pass under it.