The Green Party running a Kent council has been branded “totally clueless” for dropping funding for research into building a bypass.

Community leaders have spent decades campaigning for a “relief road” to connect the A20 and A274 in south-east Maidstone.

But a £1 million pot to investigate the Leeds-Langley link has been scrapped by the Green/Liberal Democrat coalition running Maidstone council.

The Conservatives have flooded the area with leaflets containing a link to an online petition, which they hope will spark a rethink.

If there is sufficient support, the first public meeting on the topic since 2017 will be convened, said one source.

In recent years, a communication breakdown between Maidstone council and Kent County Council (KCC), the highways authority, was blamed in part for stalled progress on a bypass.

Much of the traffic linking the A20/M20 and the A274 Sutton Road now travels along the B2163 and Willington Street.

Critics have long argued that improvements to infrastructure have not kept pace with the thousands of new homes being built, especially in Kent.

Kent county and Maidstone borough councillor, Claudine Russell, who is spearheading the leaflet campaign, said she has been encouraged by the response so far.

The leaflet says: “The Green/Lib Dem administration has scrapped the £1m funding we secured to restart work on the Leeds-Langley relief road.

“This reckless decision ignores the growing congestion crisis in our rural south. We’re fighting to get that funding reinstated.

“Villages like Leeds and Langley are being strangled by traffic, caused by years of housebuilding without the infrastructure to match.”

Bearsted borough councillor Denis Spooner said: “The Green Party/Lib Dem leadership at Maidstone council is totally clueless. The government is clearly not backing down on its pledge to build 1.5m houses, which everyone knows is practically and logistically impossible, especially in Kent.”

The Tory said those targets could mean 18,000 more houses in the Maidstone area by 2043, but few necessary changes to the stressed road networks have been introduced.

Conservative borough and parish councillor for Leeds, Cllr Gill Fort, said: “As the previous administration, we (the Conservatives) put £1m in the budget to look at the relief road and we still feel there is a need for it.

“That money has been taken out and we feel it should be put back in again. We’re going to get a load more houses whether there is a relief road or not. As it stands, all the communities, we are really, really struggling.”

But Cllr Stuart Jeffery, Green leader of Maidstone council and also a KCC member, said: “It would be a waste of money. It would require an extra 10,000 homes to be built to fund a bypass and we are not going to do that.”

Cllr Russell said around 20,000 leaflets have been printed and that early indications are that the response has been “good”.

She disputed Cllr Jeffery’s claim that it will require 10,000 homes but conceded some would be needed.

Cllr Russell added: “I think it will require a quantum of housing but the housing is coming anyway so we might as well get something out of it.”