Kent keeps saying yes to homes. So where are they?

Kent keeps saying yes to homes. So where are they?

Kent does not have a shortage of housing arguments.

It has them in village halls, planning committees, Facebook groups, election leaflets and occasionally on fences where disgruntled residents have put up a laminated sign.

What Kent has rather less of is completed homes.

The latest figures from Kent County Council’s annual Housing Information Audit provide an answer. During the year to March 2025, 7,660 net new homes were completed across Kent’s twelve districts, up almost 8% on the previous year and comfortably above the county’s ten year average.  

So Kent is building. Just not very evenly.

The surprise at the top of this year’s table is Canterbury. The district recorded 1,232 net completions, making it the only part of Kent to pass the 1,000 mark. That represented a 61% increase on the previous year and more than double Canterbury’s average annual output over the past decade.

That isn’t how many people instinctively think about Canterbury. It’s easier to picture tourists, students and the cathedral than one of the busiest housebuilding districts in the South East. Yet much of that growth came from large strategic developments that have been working their way through the planning system for years. The district’s own monitoring report shows almost 700 homes were completed on strategic sites during the year, alongside substantial student accommodation and specialist housing. Those schemes rarely generate the kind of attention that a controversial planning application does, but together they quietly reshape the county.

Elsewhere, the picture is rather different.

Dartford continued to deliver strongly, with 817 homes completed, while Thanet added 848. Tonbridge and Malling increased its annual total by more than half to 689, and Gravesham almost doubled its output from 293 homes to 546 in the space of a year.

Then there are the places heading in the opposite direction.

Maidstone has been Kent’s housebuilding machine for much of the past decade. Since 2015, it has averaged 1,185 completed homes a year, comfortably the highest in the county. Last year it delivered 605, a fall of almost 42% compared with the year before.

Sevenoaks remained at the bottom of the table with just 145 net completions, though it should be noted that it is the smallest authority in Kent. Medway, while reported separately from the Kent district figures, saw one of the biggest changes anywhere. After completing 1,300 homes in 2023/24, it delivered just 634 last year.  

That single fall is enough to change the county-wide picture. Kent’s 12 districts built more homes than the previous year. Kent and Medway together built slightly fewer.

On its own, that tells us where homes appeared last year.

It doesn’t tell us where the next wave is coming from.

For that, you have to look beyond completed homes and into the development pipeline.

Across Kent, there are 47,839 housing units with planning permission that have yet to be built. Of those, 35,040 had not even started construction by March 2025, while 12,799 were already under construction. Those are homes that have already passed through the planning system but have not yet become places for someone to live.

That is the figure that should make everyone pause.

For all the arguments about whether another housing estate should be approved, Kent already has tens of thousands of approved homes somewhere between a committee vote and a moving van.

Ashford alone has 9,584 permitted homes still to come, with 8,819 yet to break ground. Thanet already has 3,535 homes under construction, suggesting it is likely to remain one of the county’s fastest-growing districts for some time. Canterbury has identified capacity for a further 5,275 homes within its five-year land supply, although not all of those yet have planning permission.

Planning permission, in other words, is not the same as a front door materialising.

That may sound obvious, but it is often missing from the housing debate. A large development can be approved in one year, begin construction several years later and then be built in phases over the best part of a decade. By the time families move in, the original planning battle has often faded from memory.

None of this means Kent doesn’t need more homes.

It plainly does. Affordability remains a major challenge across much of the county, particularly for younger people and first-time buyers. Whatever your view of individual developments, the bigger picture is that Kent has spent years trying to balance growing demand with a planning system that is slow, complicated and frequently contested.

The latest figures suggest that striking the right balance remains difficult.

Using the government’s latest standard method for assessing housing need, only Canterbury and Dartford built enough homes last year to exceed their annual requirement. Most other districts fell short, in some cases by a considerable margin. Maidstone delivered less than half of its annual target. Medway delivered little more than a third.

Those targets remain politically contentious, and councils will continue to argue over whether they are realistic. But they do provide useful context for the completion figures. Kent is building thousands of homes every year, yet most of the county is still not delivering them at the pace national policy now expects.

The result is a picture that doesn’t fit neatly into the usual housing argument.

Kent is building more homes than it was a year ago. Some districts are growing quickly while others have slowed dramatically. Tens of thousands more homes have already been approved but are still making their way through the system.

If Kent is serious about tackling its housing shortage, planning permission is only part of the story. The equally important question is how quickly those permissions become homes people can actually live in.

Which is worth remembering the next time a planning row breaks out over a field.

Catch up

A proposed AI data centre near Ebbsfleet has become the latest test of what north Kent is prepared to build, and where. The scheme would put a major piece of Britain’s digital infrastructure on land near Dartford, months after the same developer withdrew a large battery storage project nearby. Since we published this story on Friday, it has started to blow up in local Facebook groups, which means politicians have finally begun to notice too.

One of the pleasures of our interviews is finding fascinating people you might otherwise never have come across. This week, that was writer and folklorist A W Earl. We talked about publishing, folklore, libraries, writing, being gender-fluid and why they are happiest staying out of the spotlight. It’s a thoughtful conversation that wanders into some unexpected places.

The big read

James O’Malley went undercover at Amazon’s giant Dartford fulfilment centre. Well, sort of. His “undercover investigation” actually consisted of signing up for one of Amazon’s public tours without mentioning he was a journalist, but the result is a thoughtful piece about automation, logistics, work and the uncomfortable tension between admiring remarkable engineering while questioning what it asks of the people inside it. James has written for us before, but more importantly here, he is very good on the strange places where technology, policy and everyday life crash into one another. This is well worth ten minutes of your morning.

I went on an Amazon propaganda tour

In which I’m forced to confront a contradictions in my values

Odds and Ends of HistoryJames O’Malley

Council matters

Meetings this week:

• Dover: Cabinet meets tonight (Monday) to talk about tenancy agreements, leisure facilities, Pride in Place funding, and more.
• Sevenoaks: Cabinet meets on Tuesday to discuss the next stage of the Local Plan, housing, and homelessness.
• Dover: Council gathers on Wednesday to debate Gaza and an utterly impenetrable report on the constitution.
• Ashford: Cabinet meets on Thursday to discuss finances, homelessness, domestic abuse, AI policy, and more.
• Thanet: Council meets on Thursday to discuss the budget, electronic voting, and more.

New planning applications:

• Folkestone & Hythe: Demolition and conversion of care home into 29 homes in St Mary's Bay.
• Medway: 80 bed care home and 11 adult social care units on the former Innovation Park Medway South site near Rochester Airport.
• Sevenoaks: 52 new homes in Halstead.

In brief

🪨 Kent County Council has been accused of 'ecocide' over plans to turn 100 acres of ancient woodland near Maidstone into a quarry.

🌳 Removing 30,000 tonnes of dumped waste from a woodland near Ashford will leave a 'sterile wasteland.'

☎️ Hundreds of old landline phones have been dumped near Folkestone.

🗑️ Thanet's new recycling service still seems pretty rubbish.

🪪 The Port of Dover has warned that 'time is rapidly running out' to find a solution to the EU's new Entry/Exit System causing chaos at the border.

👮‍♂️ A Kent Police officer based at Northfleet is on trial, accused of raping a colleague.

🇬🇧 Residents of Ashford are getting a bit annoyed about 'eyesore' flags put up during last year's far-right lampost bonanza that now look rather tatty.

🗣️ Nigel Farage is upset about graffiti in Folkestone that calls for his assassination.

🗳️ ITV have been asking voters in Gillingham about Andy Burnham.

🏭 Plans for a new hydrogen plant in Manston have been submitted.

🪵 Mink numbers are set to be reduced by 90% in Kent.

🦋 A colony of rare moths, not recorded in England since 1952, have been discovered by accident near Dover.

🐕 An artist behind a new sculpture in Deal is annoyed that dogs keep peeing on it.

🏨 Plans have been launched to turn the Grand in Folkestone into 'Barbican-on-Sea.'

⛪ Residents in Folkestone who campaigned against a homeless shelter and food bank will be delighted to hear that funding for the project fell through.

🛒 M&S could return to Folkestone following a 20 year absence.

🎈 The Goodyear blimp has been visiting Kent quite a lot in the last few days.

🪻 A lavender farm near Sevenoaks has been besieged by so many influencers that they've had to install wifi boosters in the fields.

🚂 Herne Bay has spent some government regeneration funding on a land train, which is hard to argue with.

🍓 The obligatory annual story of a Kent farm supplying strawberries to Wimbledon.

🏆 The Kent Press and Broadcast Awards took place on Friday. Two of our team members were up for awards, but even though we didn't win either, it was still a great achievement to be there. I did get a highly commended award for my work on a story for our sister publication, Local Authority, so that was nice. Elsewhere, it was great to see fellow local independents recognised, such as our friends at the Folkestone Dispatch, the Isle of Thanet News, Brightside Publishing, and Bygone Kent.

Property of the week

This is Hawthorn Cottage, a three-bedroom country home near Lydd that comes with the full Romney Marsh package of big skies, open fields and the quiet suspicion that the weather is part of the architecture. It has the feel of a house that has been properly lived in and properly looked after, with a kitchen overlooking the rear garden, sitting and dining rooms linked by a double-sided multi-fuel stove, a separate study, a family bathroom upstairs and a ground-floor shower room. Outside is the real selling point, with cottage-style gardens wrapping around three sides of the house, several seating areas, parking for up to five cars, a garage, a store, and an outside WC, all set in about a quarter of an acre. It is rural enough to come with the usual practical footnotes, including a shared private water supply, shared septic tank and LPG heating, but that is probably the deal if you want this much space and silence just over a mile from Lydd.

Check out this 3 bedroom semi-detached house for sale on Rightmove

3 bedroom semi-detached house for sale in Midley Wall, Lydd, Romney Marsh, Kent, TN29 for £500,000. Marketed by Hobbs Parker Estate Agents, Ashford

Rightmove.co.uk

Events this week

🧑‍🎨 Until 19 Jul - Medway Open Studios // Free trail of art with dozens of venues and hundreds of artists. Various locations. Free.

🗣️ 9 - 11 Jul - Gavin Esler Conversations // Broadcaster interviews notable political figures, including Neil Kinnock, Jeremy Hunt, and Penny Mordaunt. Astor Theatre, Deal. Tickets £13.

🎸 Sat 11 Jul - Coach Party // Pop-rock four-piece tour new album. Swale Assembly, Sittingbourne. Tickets £18.

Footnotes

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