Our County Council manifesto pledges are: 

 

Repair potholes, improve roads 

• Lobby the Department for Transport for the billions needed for all of Kent’s road repairs 

• Report it! programs to be shared with parishes and residents.

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Litter  

• Crack down on organised waste crime and encourage harder and smarter penalties for fly-tipping. Create new tools to assist in tackling offenders. 

• Introduce a Kent-wide school scheme to return littering to an anti-social behaviour status. 

• Roll out to all Parish Councils the ‘Adopt a Street’ system to keep Kent clean with agency from the general public. 

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Support farmers  

• Financial support for farmers to be increased to support the transition to nature-friendly farming. 

• Increase the amount of local food grown and locally traded as much as possible. 

• Involve school children in growing, preparing, and cooking food, as part of the curriculum. 

• Back best-farming practices. 

• Repair people’s access to green space and waterways in line with protecting grazing and pastures. 

• Call to end the use of bee-killing pesticides. 

• Lobby the planning system to deliver fast-track permissions for the building of necessary infrastructure on farms, such as small reservoirs, irrigation and glasshouses. 

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Reintroduce rural buses 

• Reduce transport-related social exclusion, particularly in rural areas.  

• Bus services covering rural areas, which have allocated funding and are supported by the local community, are not being enabled. Let’s fix that!   

• Significant growth is needed. This should be underpinned by an integrated and comprehensive approach to bus provision.   

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A non-selective secondary school for Cranbrook 

• Facilitate a formal and inclusive consultation. 

• Present the fact that the new government’s housing targets will bring in more families that will need a local school. 

• Infrastructure plans should be measured for future demand and need, not today’s.  

  

 

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Our Borough Council manifesto pledges are: 

  

Democracy

• Selecting candidates who are listening and respecting their communities first. 

• Encouraging engagement in public consultations by making them clearer, simpler and widely available. 

• Offering members of the public proper time to promote their ideas and concerns, ask and respond to questions, and debate issues constructively.  

• Increasing opportunities for people to engage at council committees and full council meetings. 

• Pushing for greater transparency and openness so that residents can be better informed about how the council is performing, what consultations are taking place, and what decisions are being and have been made. 
    

Planning & Housing  

• Normalise development proposals through the promotion of positive town planning and neighbourhood plans. Listen to and enable local people and organisations in the formulation of these plans.   

• Ensure that the significance of the High Weald National Landscape is appropriately considered in planning decisions. 

• Maintain a balance of rural-urban councillors on the Planning Committee. 

• Bring local housing needs to the forefront and meet them within new developments. 

• Insist contributions from developers are distributed fairly throughout the borough and deliver improvements to infrastructure that benefit residents. 

• Encourage and support small-scale local and community-led housing delivery schemes, such as community land trusts and co-housing projects. 

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Waste & Recycling

• Support the council in adopting national strategies for tackling the problem of single-use plastics and non-recyclable packaging. 

• Encourage the council to help residents with recycling at a more local level, for example listing the local repair cafes, yard sales, vintage and pre-loved furniture, and fashion shops. 

• Educate councillors on how to facilitate local focus groups on initiatives that reduce food waste and share excess food in the community, thereby reducing CO2 emissions. 

• Adopt regular public information schemes on littering and fly-tipping. 

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Roads & Traffic 

• Aim to declutter our towns and villages of unnecessary street furniture and road signs and prioritise the mending of pavements and verges. 

• Lobby for diversions of HGVs from our rural lanes and villages. 

• Present working examples of how to successfully tackle excess traffic movements caused by the search for on-street parking spaces in our towns and villages. 

• Simplify and consolidate fee structures in council-owned car parks whilst keeping them free from borough-wide subsidies. 

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Health & Wellbeing 

• Lead on addressing the issue of airborne pollution and seek to find ways to improve air quality and enhance the beauty of our natural environment. 

• Implementing modern methods to clean and cool our towns. 

• Support improvements to public rights of way to develop a better network of cycle and bridleway routes in our towns, villages, and rural parishes. 

• Ensure our public green spaces are conserved and enhanced, and are safe and accessible to all users. 

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Community

• Promote safe neighbourhoods by working with town and parish councils, community groups and community safety stakeholders. 

• Promote the protection and development of community assets, such as community centres through liaison with parish and town councils, ward councillors, community groups and other stakeholders. 

• Bring back the recently cut CCTV monitoring programme! This had made our streets safer, protected traders and enabled the police to obtain convictions for criminal offences. We will seek a funding contribution from the police, as well as robustly challenging the decisions taken by the current administration to remove this vital tool in tackling crime. 

• Embed the community support scheme in the council for its remaining years. 

• Roll out the regeneration of the remaining civic buildings to ensure they are preserved for the public benefit in the Unitary authority. Take soundings from the public concerning the future use of these buildings. 

• Use our position of influence with the national parties to progress licensing of a full market in Calverley Road pedestrian precinct in Tunbridge Wells; to promote a better market, support existing and new businesses, and attract footfall. 

• Always make the case for the inclusion and dignity of all age groups and residents with special needs when allocating resources. 

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Climate Change 

• Lobby to embed improvements to building regulations to raise the standard of housing design, quality and energy efficiency. 

• Promote sustainable development, to ensure our social and economic needs are met whilst protecting and enhancing the borough’s environmental resilience to climate change, including our contribution to our biodiversity and nature recovery. 

• The council will not fulfil its climate action commitment to eliminate carbon omissions in its operations by 2030. We have some answers to that and will keep telling the administration where they are going wrong. 

• Support the provision of EV charging points on Council operated property. 

• Use our expertise to promote and lead in adopting modern methods (not greenwashing) to clean our air in built up areas and cool our towns. 

  

Buying

• Review and refine the procurement process that uses out dated techniques which prioritise price over quality and service. 

• Use the Local Government Association guidelines with regard to disclosure. 

• Draw from our working knowledge of contracts and services to challenge providers on delivery. 

  

Full Borough Approach 

• Infrastructure First is our party-wide priority which demands fair and proportionate resources be allocated to rural areas, including the three towns outside Tunbridge Wells and our many villages. 

• We continue to listen to the concerns and suggestions of residents and employers outside of TW and ensure they are given full consideration when allocating resources across the borough. 

• We value our local town and parish councils and we liaise with them regularly; providing in depth reports and building relationships which sets us apart from other councillors. 

• Use the work of the neighbourhood plans to identify local needs and desires for our local communities.