The future of the Manston Airport site is one of the most
significant decisions for the future of Thanet as a whole and there are various
possibilities as to what may happen to the site, the most likely seems to be
the current owners developing the site, which is what this outline application
is for.
The first factor in any large development plans is do the
developers have any track record and are they likely to carry out roughly what
they are asking for planning consent to do.
In this case the owners are also the owners of Discovery
Park as Sandwich, which has become the main centre of quality employment in
this area, they took over the running of discovery park when the previous owner
decided to pull out and have achieved pretty much what they said they would
there.
Their plans for Manston are for a mixed use site, quality
housing and high speck light industrial unites.
They include, 85,000 square meters of manufacturing space
aiming to provide 2,000 skilled jobs, 2500 houses (this needs to be taken within
the government remit that TDC has to find land for just under 16,000 homes),
land and funding for two primary schools and funding for secondary school
pupils, an East Kent Sports Village, wave garden, there is also scope within
the application for application for community facilities such as a GP surgery,
community centre and local shops.
The bottom line being that a company with a good local track
record who already own a local development providing employment for around
2,000 people want to build another development doing something similar. You may
wish to look at their plans and comment on them.
Links
Stone Hill Park website http://www.stonehillpark.co.uk/
The application on Thanet Council’s website https://planning.thanet.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=summary&keyVal=O5Z2F2QE00300
You can comment online, on the council’s website (before
midnight tomorrow), if you can get it to work, if you can’t you can email your
comments to the council, your email must be sent by midnight tomorrow and must
include your name and address, contact phone number also recommended, here is the planning department’s email address planning.services@thanet.gov.uk
The council’s planning website is a tenuous and unreliable
piece of technology, included to time out and say the page is unavailable so I would
recommend trying to look at other comments there and then typing your own
comment out in MS Word or some other word processing program before you start
your personal battle with their website.
I did email the council essentially asking them if there was
much point in bothering to comment, here is my eamil:-
Re my phone call about comments on using the new planning
website; I am writing to request the information that wasn’t immediately at
hand to the officer I spoke to, at his request.
With respect to public comments, (these were not previously
published in the way they are on the new planning site) meaning that the way
they are handled is pertinent to using responding to applications.
1 Comments appear either to have the respondents name and
address redacted to the street name, or to have no respondents name or address.
Does this mean where comments have no respondents name or address that neither
were supplied to the council, and if so are these valid comments?
2 Are the comments weighted to the respondents location, and
if so by what method? To expand on this would UK taxpayers opinions be of more
significance that those of foreign nationals and TDC council taxpayers and
local residents be of the most significance?
3 Does the council have some method of ensuring that
multiple comments are not made by one respondent under different aliases? For
instance, without one, the applicant could make multiple comments supporting
their application and so influence the planning committee.
As discussed on the phone it is my intention to comment of
some live applications, using your new website, and as these have relatively
short time windows during which I can comment, your prompt reply would be much
appreciated.
And here is the council’s reply:-
"Dear Mr Child
Thank you for your email. We appreciate that the Manston
Airport Application is large and that the website might timeout when viewing
all the documents. We are working with providers to improve this, and the
application is also available to view in hardcopy in the Gateway.
All comments that come through our public access are passed
to the planning officer responsible for the application. We do not accept
comments without the customer name and address information being provided. The
system automatically redacts all of the personal information from the comments
available to view online, due to data protection legislation, which means that
this information does not show on the website.
The Council is legally obliged to take into account the
comments from members of the public and other interested parties when deciding
all planning applications. Furthermore, the Council encourages local residents
to have their say in planning matters. However, it is important to remember
that the Council is responsible for making the final decision on the application
and for deciding how much “weight” comments have on its final decision.
Regards
Mandie McKenzie
Principal Technical Officer
Thanet District Council"
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.