Work has started on 12 council flats at the old Blue Bell Hill car park. The units are built in Peterborough, assembled in September and let from spring 2027.

Site preparation has started on the disused commuter car park at Blue Bell Hill, where Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council is putting up 12 self-contained flats for families it has a legal duty to house. The units are being built in a factory in Peterborough and will be assembled on the site in September, with the first tenants due to move in next spring.

The site is the old commuter coach car park off Lord Lees Grove, which the council closed in 2023 after use fell away and anti-social behaviour took hold. Its postal address reads Chatham, which misleads almost everyone, but Blue Bell Hill village sits in the parish of Aylesford and the land is Tonbridge and Malling’s, which is why the scheme runs through this borough’s planning register rather than Medway’s.

Permission was granted under reference TM/25/01938/FL, validated on 18 November 2025 and decided at a meeting of the full council on 27 January 2026. The register describes it as the erection of a modular building of 12 self-contained apartments for use as temporary housing accommodation, with landscaping, a refuse and cycle store, parking and an office.

What actually released the diggers is a second application most people never see. On 15 June the council approved 26/00560/RD, which discharged three conditions attached to the permission: site investigation, surface water drainage, and the demolition and construction management plan. Those are the pre-start gates. Once they cleared, the contractor could open up the ground.

What the 12 flats are meant to fix

The council’s own figures are blunt about the problem. It says it currently has between 90 and 100 households in temporary accommodation at any one time, owns or leases only around 30 properties to put them in, and spends about £2.2 million a year on the shortfall. Suitable accommodation in the north of the borough, it says, has been the hardest to find.

The government’s own count backs that up and adds the detail the press release leaves out. In the detailed local authority tables published by the housing ministry, Tonbridge and Malling had 98 households in temporary accommodation on 31 March 2026, among them 53 households with children and 131 children.

Only 31 of those 98 were housed in council or housing association stock. Sixty-two were in nightly paid, privately managed self-contained accommodation, the most expensive category there is and the one that generates most of that £2.2 million bill. Five were in leased private sector accommodation. None were in bed and breakfast, and none were in hostels or refuges.

Bar chart showing that of 98 households in temporary accommodation in Tonbridge and Malling on 31 March 2026, 62 were in nightly paid privately managed self-contained accommodation, 31 in council or housing association stock, 5 in private sector accommodation, and none in bed and breakfast or hostels.
Total 98 households, down from 125 a year earlier. Source: MHCLG statutory homelessness detailed local authority tables.
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The same tables record something else worth knowing: 62 households owed a temporary accommodation duty by Tonbridge and Malling were placed in another local authority’s area, every one of them elsewhere in the South East. That is what a shortage of local stock looks like from a resident’s side, and it is the number the Blue Bell Hill flats are aimed at.

The figures are moving the right way

A year earlier, at 31 March 2025, the borough had 125 households in temporary accommodation, 68 of them with children, and 155 children. Six households were in bed and breakfast. On the ministry’s own measure the borough has gone from 2.21 households in temporary accommodation per thousand households to 1.74, while the England total rose from 130,890 to 135,580 over the same year.

That leaves Tonbridge and Malling with one of the lower rates in Kent. Of the county’s districts with published figures, only Tunbridge Wells (1.44 per thousand) sits below it. Dartford records 10.05, Gravesham 6.10, Dover 5.85, Medway 5.42 and Maidstone 3.35. Ashford and Folkestone and Hythe are not in the table for this quarter.

None of which makes 131 children in temporary accommodation a comfortable number, and the nightly paid figure means most of those households are in the least secure and most costly kind of housing the council can arrange.

What is actually being built

The homes are two-bedroom flats designed to take a range of household sizes, built by Zed Pods, the modular housing firm the council appointed after an open tender. The units are precision built at the company’s Peterborough factory and craned into position on site, which is why the disruption at Blue Bell Hill should be measured in weeks rather than the best part of a year.

The council says the building has a design life of more than 100 years and that the flats are EPC A rated, with high performance insulation, solar panels and air source heat pumps. That matters more here than it does on a normal housing scheme: the people moving in are, by definition, in financial difficulty, and running costs are the bill they cannot absorb. An on-site office is included so housing staff can manage the flats and support residents in person.

The budget is £4 million, made up of £2.2 million from the government’s Local Authority Housing Fund, £1.4 million from council reserves and up to £1 million of developer contributions from schemes elsewhere in the borough. Put another way, the national grant covers roughly what the council currently spends on temporary accommodation in a single year.

Cllr Robin Betts, the council’s cabinet member for housing, environment and economy, said at the site: “Everyone has a right to a decent place to live, and we are proud to be able to deliver this innovative modular housing project to support local families from Tonbridge and Malling.” Tom Northway, chairman of Zed Pods, said the project “shows how offsite construction can help deliver high quality, energy efficient homes”.

What it means for you

If you live at Blue Bell Hill or in Aylesford parish, expect the noticeable phase to be September, when the modules are delivered and lifted into place. The construction management plan governing deliveries and site hours was approved on 15 June under 26/00560/RD and can be read on the council’s planning portal, which is also where any complaint about how the work is run would be measured against.

If you are homeless or at risk of it in the north of the borough, these 12 flats are for households with a local connection to Tonbridge and Malling and will be allocated by the council, not applied for directly. They are not available until spring 2027, so they change nothing about a case this year.

If you follow how the borough spends money, the number to watch is not the £4 million build cost but the £2.2 million annual temporary accommodation bill, and specifically the 62 households in nightly paid accommodation. Twelve council-owned flats can only take a bite out of that, and whether the bill falls will show up in the ministry’s quarterly tables long before it shows up in a press release.

The council has also said the site’s future after Kent’s local government reorganisation in 2028 will be handled as part of the transfer to whatever authority replaces it, and that temporary accommodation will remain that authority’s duty.

For other applications going through this borough, see our Tonbridge planning news page. For what homes in the borough are actually selling for, see Tonbridge house prices.

Sources