There have been fresh calls for changes to be made to one of Sheppey’s busiest junctions.

Minster-on-Sea Parish Council has received complaints about tailbacks from where Barton Hill Drive meets Lower Road.

It has called on Kent Highways and developers at the nearby Thistle Hill estate to replace the current traffic light system with a roundabout.

Peter MacDonald, chairman of the parish council’s planning and transport committee, called the current traffic system “totally unacceptable”.

He said: “Normally there is a hold-up from the Cowstead Corner roundabout [to the Barton Hill Drive junction], but on several occasions during the year, several people have noticed it going back to the first roundabout, three quarters of a mile away.

“It’s not just at certain times on weekdays, it’s during the day at weekends as well.”

He went on to say that when planning permission was originally granted for the homes, there was an understanding that two roundabouts would be built.

One, at the junction of Thistle Hill Way, has been built, but developers came up with an alternative traffic light system for the Barton Hill Drive intersection instead of the second roundabout.

The parish council is querying whether a “trigger point” has been reached where the number of homes is now enough to prompt Kent Highways Services and developers to look again at the local infrastructure.

Parish councillors have written to Sheppey MP Gordon Henderson to tell him of their concerns.

A spokesman for Bovis Homes, which is the umbrella group for the developers of the Thistle Hill Estate, said there was no original obligation for them to build the roundabout.

He said: “We have complied with Condition Five of the original planning permission – dated September 12, 1997 – which requires traffic signals at the Barton Hill Drive/Lower Road junction before the 500th occupation.

"Clause 6.1.1.5 of the Section 106 agreement from the same date also requires traffic light control at this junction.”

No one from Kent Highways Services was available to comment as the Times Guardian was going to press.