‘Where is the detail?’ was the question repeatedly asked by the members of the public attending a consultation on plans for a 5,000-home garden village project.

Two days of exhibitions were held in Lenham where Homes England and Maidstone Borough Council - the joint promoters of the Heathlands project - set out their stall.

The exhibitions at the Lenham Community Centre on Saturday, May 10 and at the Dog and Bear pub in Lenham Square on Tuesday last week were attended by 187 people in total.

While they indicated in broad-brush terms where areas of housing and employment development would go, which areas were to be left as public space, and where footpaths and access roads would sit, some felt there was scant detail about the costings behind the project that would determine whether or not it was feasible.

One big question is whether the scheme will deliver a new railway station for Heathlands - which the government inspector who approved the inclusion of the garden village in the council’s adopted Local Plan said was a necessity.

Officers at the roadshow told Kent Online that they were “99% certain” that the station would be delivered, but there seemed to be no certainty around the cost.

Visitors were told £13m at the first exhibition, while three days later at the second, it was suggested it might be £15m.

Kent’s newest station, Thanet Parkway, cost £44m after originally being budgeted at £11m.

In any event, Network Rail will not pay for the station, and the cost will have to come off the profits accruing to the farmers who are providing the land for the development.

Locals - and the constituency MP Helen Whately - are fearful that even if a new station is provided, it may come at the cost of the closure of the existing Lenham Station, which is barely two miles away.

The consultation was intended to help Maidstone council shape a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) that will guide the way the new village at Lenham Heath will be shaped.

The council said the two events were an opportunity for residents to chip in with their local knowledge and suggestions, before the final SPD is drawn up to be presented to the council’s cabinet in July.

But that was not what John Britt, the chairman of Lenham Parish Council, was expecting.

He said: “The planning inspector set out clearly a number of questions that he wanted answered in this SPD. They have not been answered.

“There is no business plan for the railway station - a requirement of Network Rail. There is no detail about how a proposed new water treatment plant will be paid for or about who will pay for the new schools. The public are not being given the opportunity to challenge the outcomes; this is merely a tick-box exercise.”

Cllr Stuart Jeffery, the Green party leader of Maidstone council, had the difficult job of defending the project which was put into the Local Plan by his predecessors, even though he himself had voted against it.

He said: “I am fairly confident about the station. We have met with railway people and they are on board. We will have to put a Grampian clause in any grant of planning permission, which will ensure the project can’t progress beyond a certain point unless the station is built.”

At present, that is expected to be at the end of phase one of the project, which will see 1,300 homes built between 2030 and 2037.

But Cllr Jeffery added: “Clearly none of us have a crystal ball in terms of geo-politics, war, famine, plague etc, there are obviously risks.

“Network Rail has in principle said yes, but where is the money? The £13m was from a cost estimated two years ago; I suspect it is over that now.

“There’s a load of questions about the business case for a station to work through - and we are engaging with that.

“From a council perspective, we are doing everything we can to make sure we deliver that.”

Cllr Jeffery felt that the presence of the council as joint promoter made the delivery of a station more likely. He said: “We can put that Grampion clause in the planning application, but if Homes England were doing this alone, they could submit a planning application without a station and even if we as a council objected, it could win approval at appeal.”

Liz Meek, a resident from nearby Sandway, was sceptical that a Heathlands station would achieve the desired aim of taking traffic from the development off the local roads.

She said: “I live close to Lenham Station, but when I was commuting, I travelled to Headcorn Station every day, not Lenham - why wouldn’t you, when the trains there are three an hour as opposed to the scant service at Lenham?”

She suggested, therefore, that the new Heathlands residents would do the same, motoring down single-carriageway roads to the south of the development to get there.

Kent Online asked planning officers what assurance had been given by Southeastern that if a new station were created that trains would stop at both Lenham and Lenham Heath, rather than, perhaps, alternative service stops. We were told there had been no discussions about that.

Cllr Jeffery said that although Homes England was working on a business case for the station, there had not been time to produce one yet.

He said: “We’ve had six months to get where we are today - no way could we have done the work on a business case that quickly.”

Cllr Jeffery was asked what new information had been provided to residents at the exhibitions, and he agreed: “I doubt there’s much that’s massively new.

“What I hope is that today, people will give us nuances, their specific concerns, and point out things that we might have missed.”

“We can then include any necessary mitigation measures in our final SPD.”

One of the missed items, according to villagers, was that the bridge over the HS1 railway that Homes England and MBC want people to use to gain access to the proposed country park is in private ownership.

Another, is that the proposed location of the new sewage plant is on the site of a Saxon settlement and in the midst of the more important heritage areas.

An aspect yet to be decided is the “stewardship” of the country park and open spaces that are part of the plan.

Cllr Jeffery said: “Hopefully they will be council-run. If not the borough, then the parish.”

But he agreed there had been no discussions about where money to maintain the parks would come from or whether the landowners would also be required to set aside a seed fund for the park’s management. But he added: “Of course, we will have the council tax from 5,000 new properties, so I’m sure our parks department could take it on.”

The outline scheme indicates two new bridges being built across the HS1 rail line. Cllr Jeffery was asked whether these had been costed.

He said: “No. There was an infrastucture plan submitted to the Local Plan inquiry, but that’s now three years old, so we will have to look again before the planning applications start rolling in.”

The garden village is to be built in stages, with the final phase not ending until 2054.

Long before that, Maidstone council is to be abolished in a local government reorganisation.

Cllr Jeffery said: “There are clear risks around the reorganisation, but we have to go with what we know and hope the future is okay.

“We must just hope that the new unitary authority will pick up the reins from MBC, or we won’t have a hand in shaping the development at all.”

We can’t undo the past

Cllr Jeffery said there were other risks to the scheme: “Resources are getting quite scarce. The price of everything just seems to ratchet up. Potentially, there may be a labour shortage [of construction workers]. On top of which, the property market has gone into abeyance in the moment, with the cost-of-living crisis, houses just aren’t being sold.

“These are external risks and there’s nothing we can do about them.”

But he said: “The bottom line for me is that the development will go ahead in some form, and we have an opportunity to make it as good as it can be. which is why I’m putting a lot of personal energy into this.

“It wasn’t our Local Plan [The Green Party/Lib Dem Alliance’s], but we can’t undo the past. We can make it as sustainable as possible. It’s the best we can do in the situation we were given.”

Outside the official consultation, the Save Our Heathlands (SOHL) campaign had its own stall, manned by the two Lenham Independent councillors, Tom and Janetta Sams, and campaigners Kate Hammond and Steve Heeley.

Mr Heeley asked: “Six years after this was first proposed and what progress have they made?”

Ms Hammond suggested the plan might ultimately be scuppered by the landowners pulling out of the deal, as they realised the spiralling costs they would be expected to pay for - and therefore their diminishing returns.

She said: “Homes England secured options on the land for five years. The first of those options runs out next year. What if the landowners won’t renew them?”

Kent Online asked Homes England about this, but received no answer other than: “All detail about option agreements is confidential.”

Helen Whately, the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, was among the visitors to the exhibition.

After a tour, she said: “Right now, it’s an area of fields and heathlands and the exhibition here brings to life that it’s going to be turned into a small town.

“Maidstone council has put a lot of effort into coming up with a diagram of what that town might be like, but it’s still building a small town where there is currently countryside.

“That isn’t something that I or my constituents want to see.

“It does feel like that the bulldozers are rolling on and seem unstoppable.

“It’s a strange situation where Maidstone council and Homes England are going to jointly seek planning permission - from Maidstone council.

“There is an obvious conflict with the borough council both applying for permission and passing judgement. That does feel that inevitably there won’t be enough challenge in the process.”

Mrs Whately said she was meeting the Housing Minister in a few weeks to discuss that potential conflict, but she said: “I’m not optimistic about the outcome because he is part of a government that wants to build, build, build.

“They have reduced the housing targets for cities like London and increased the targets for rural communities like ours.

“So everyone who is opposing it, like me, is fighting an uphill battle.

Mrs Whately said the provision of a station was “really important.”

She said: “Otherwise, everyone coming and going from Heathlands will have to go pretty much on the A20, that will be a lot of traffic.

“But I can’t see Network Rail agreeing to have three small stations - Lenham, Heathlands and Charing - so close together.

“From my conversations with Network Rail and Southeastern, they are always trying to reduce the number of stations that trains stop at in order to speed up journey times.

She said: “One thing that’s clear is that it will take a very long time to completion.

“Such a long build-out generates ever more uncertainty that the community will get what is being promised.

When the council is abolished, who does the public hold to account for failed promises?

“It’s all very well for MBC and Homes England to say ‘Oh well, there will be new primary and secondary schools, a station, medical centre and improvement to the M20 junction,’ but can they guarantee that in five, 10 or 15 years’ time, all these things will be delivered?

“It will be a whole different group of people in charge then.

“When Maidstone council is abolished in a couple of years, who does the public hold to account for a failure to deliver on their promises?”

Mrs Whately was also concerned about the level of housing development more generally.

She said: “You’ve got the 5,000 here, then there’s Lidsing, then Highstead Park near Sittingbourne, the Duchy development at Faversham, the Winterbourne Fields development near Boughton-under-Blean, they total around 20,000 new houses. That’s increasing the population of my constituency by 50%.

“It will completely change the character of what is at the moment, a beautiful rural area.”