Land between Copper Lodge and The Cloth Hall, Water Lane, Smarden

6006475·Ashford·16 Sept 2026dismissed·PA/2025/0824

Tier label used

—

The tier sentence ¶62

“their support of local services and facilities”

Summary

35 homes (40% affordable) on a field on the western edge of Smarden, beside the Grade II* Cloth Hall and the conservation area. Dismissed after hearing. Despite passing S5(1)(j) (3.16-year supply, agreed well-related), cumulative harm to five designated assets (unjustified under HE4/HE6), serious landscape harm and a suburban design with poor privacy "substantially outweigh" substantial housing and affordable benefits.

Why this is cited

This decision was picked up by the search on the words above, which refer to services, not to a settlement tier. generic.

Sources

Decision on the Planning Inspectorate appeals service · full decision note · letter pins-corpus/6006475.txt

One entry in a register of 203 decisions that matched the search for a settlement-tier label, each read at every matching passage and classified by how the label influenced the decision. The quotation was checked against the source named above. Not legal advice. © Planning Distilled. Text, data and images on this page are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: share and adapt them freely, with credit to Planning Distilled. Quotations from decision letters, plans and the Framework remain the copyright of their publishers. Source and data: github.com/planningdistilled/research.