Avid readers of our news items may recall that we last touched on this subject back in February 2023. Back in 2020 Natural England and the Environment Agency discovered high levels of polluting phosphates in the Stodmarsh Lakes just outside Canterbury and put a stop to all residential planning applications in the catchment area. This includes the local authorities of Dover, Ashford, Maidstone and Canterbury and created a massive backlog in the planning system.
Since then various solutions have been mooted along the lines of creating a ‘giant reed bed’ in the Stour Valley to mitigate pollution. This is now getting closer to fruition and indeed Ashford Borough Council and Canterbury City Council have combined to deal with the problem on a ‘catchment basis’ rather than a local authority area by area solution.
Stour Environmental Credits https://www.stourenvironmentalcredits.co.uk/ are now offering small-scale developers the ability to buy credits to mitigate perceived pollution from development schemes, with credit prices ranging between £235 plus VAT for nitrogen credits, and £3,500 plus VAT for phosphorous credits. Full details of the scheme are available on the weblink above.
Credit must be given to these two local authorities who have at long last found a partial solution for developers in this area. In the longer term obviously more effective sewerage treatment plants are probably the better answer to the problem, but this solution at least gets development up and running again.