Oaken Wood Quarry Expansion Moves Closer After KCC Backs Plan by Six Votes

Kent County Council hasn’t approved a quarry extension into Oaken Wood—but by keeping the site in its minerals plan, it has moved that prospect a considerable step closer. The argument pits an irreplaceable ancient woodland against local jobs, construction supplies and the environmental cost of importing millions of tonnes of stone from much farther afield. Neither side of that equation offers an easy or painless answer.

This isn’t a fresh row that sprang up overnight. Oaken Wood has been caught in the path of Hermitage Quarry for well over a decade. Campaigners were warning of “death by quarry” in 2013, when the government approved an earlier westerly extension covering around 79 acres and allowing another 16.2 million tonnes of ragstone to be extracted. That earlier permission resulted in the loss of roughly 31 hectares of ancient woodland. The latest proposal would take another 41 hectares.

So, when councillors gathered at County Hall on 16 July 2026, they weren’t opening a new chapter so much as turning another page in a very old book.

By 37 votes to 31, with four abstentions, KCC agreed to publish and submit its updated Kent Mineral Sites Plan for independent examination. The document retains one new hard-rock allocation: 96 hectares of land south and west of the existing Hermitage Quarry, near Aylesford, Barming and East Malling. Around 49 hectares could eventually be excavated, of which approximately 41 hectares is classed as a Plantation on Ancient Woodland Site, or PAWS.

That isn’t planning permission. No bulldozer can roll into Oaken Wood on the strength of this vote, no trees can be felled and no stone can be removed. There will first be a six-week consultation, followed by an examination into whether the plan is legally compliant and sound. KCC currently expects examination hearings in June 2027 and possible adoption in February 2028. Gallagher would still need to submit a separate planning application, environmental assessments and detailed mitigation proposals before quarrying could begin.

But it would be equally misleading to pretend nothing of consequence happened.

KCC’s own report says allocating the land establishes that the authority considers mineral development there “acceptable in principle”. Should the plan survive examination and be adopted, Gallagher would be applying to quarry land already allocated for that purpose by the authority which would determine its application. Removing Oaken Wood from the plan would have stripped away that policy support. The council didn’t give the quarry a green light, but it certainly moved it farther up the slip road.

The meeting chairman, Jeremy Eustace, had described the vote beforehand as a “substantive policy framework decision”. Four days later, council leader Linden Kemkaran issued an unusual fact-check stressing repeatedly that councillors hadn’t approved quarrying. Technically, she was right. Yet the narrower answer risks missing the wider point: councillors chose to retain Oaken Wood as Kent’s only proposed hard-rock allocation and send that policy forward for examination.

An amendment that never reached a vote

The meeting might have taken a different course had Green group leader Mark Hood’s amendment been accepted.

Hood attempted to remove the Hermitage Quarry allocation, arguing that the claimed exceptional reasons were outweighed by the environmental damage. He said Natural England and the Forestry Commission regarded ancient woodland as irreplaceable and warned that new planting couldn’t reproduce the ecological continuity of land which had remained wooded for centuries.

Stuart Jeffery tried to second the amendment, but Eustace ruled it out. He said it hadn’t been provided to him in writing before the meeting and that removing a major site allocation without the necessary review could leave the plan incapable of being reasonably and lawfully resolved.

The constitution says an amendment must be given to the chairman in writing before the meeting, although it also gives the chair discretion over whether a late amendment falls. Eustace told councillors that “launching it from the floor” wouldn’t help their cause and said he could have considered it had it been supplied earlier. Members therefore faced an all-or-nothing choice: advance the complete plan containing Oaken Wood or reject the whole lot.

That procedural failure matters. Several councillors said they supported the wider minerals plan but couldn’t stomach the Oaken Wood allocation. The amendment’s supporters knew the issue had previously been debated in committee, yet apparently failed to place the written wording in the one pair of hands that mattered. Whatever anyone thinks of the chairman’s ruling, the campaign to remove the site arrived at the crucial moment without its paperwork buttoned up.

What would be lost

Oaken Wood isn’t necessarily what people picture when they hear “ancient woodland”. Much of it consists of managed sweet chestnut coppice, cut in rotation and allowed to regrow, rather than rows of untouched, centuries-old oaks.

But the age and condition of the present trees isn’t the legal or ecological heart of the matter. PAWS land has been continuously wooded since at least 1600. Beneath and between the coppice lies ancient soil containing fungi, seed banks and organisms formed through centuries of ecological continuity. KCC’s own assessment accepts that some deterioration would “inevitably” result from digging up and moving those soils.

The woodland supports bluebells, veteran trees and at least 26 ancient-woodland indicator plants, alongside nightingales, nightjars, dormice, owls, butterflies and scarce invertebrates. Its soil is both a carbon store and a living network. As one campaigner put it, “It’s not just the soil, it’s a living system.”

National planning policy therefore sets the bar deliberately high. Development involving the loss or deterioration of ancient woodland should be refused unless there are wholly exceptional reasons and a suitable compensation strategy.

Gallagher proposes translocating the ancient woodland soil and creating or enhancing around 154 hectares of native woodland and other habitat. Supporters say the restored woodland would be more diverse than the existing sweet chestnut plantation and eventually provide a larger habitat area. Critics answer that hectares on a spreadsheet aren’t like-for-like currency: a newly planted wood can’t simply be swapped for a centuries-old ecosystem as though changing a faulty toaster.

Kent Wildlife Trust argues that recognised guidance points towards as much as 30 hectares of new woodland for every hectare of ancient woodland lost—around 1,230 hectares in this case—alongside compensation for damage to surrounding habitat, protected species and biodiversity. KCC’s officers, by contrast, consider the proposed strategy sufficiently credible to justify testing at examination. That gulf won’t be bridged by warm words; it will require the evidence to stand up under the inspector’s microscope.

The stone beneath the argument

Then comes the other side of the balance sheet.

Kent faces an assessed hard-rock shortfall of approximately 19.9 million tonnes over the plan period. Hermitage Quarry produces around one million tonnes of primary aggregate each year and supplies stone used in roads, concrete, schools, hospitals, sea defences and other construction. It is also the principal source of high-quality Kentish ragstone dimension stone used to repair buildings including the Tower of London, Leeds Castle and historic Kent structures.

Opponents rightly question how much of the proposed output would actually preserve historic buildings. During the debate, councillors argued that as much as 99% could become crushed aggregate rather than carefully cut heritage stone. They asked for hard numbers showing how much stone Canterbury Cathedral, Leeds Castle and other historic sites would genuinely require over the coming decades. Those questions deserve proper answers rather than a parade of famous buildings used as window dressing.

Yet the aggregate can’t simply be wished away. Roads, houses and infrastructure still need stone, and rejecting Hermitage Quarry wouldn’t end quarrying’s environmental impact. It would shift at least some of it somewhere else.

KCC’s latest assessment says 56.6% of Kent’s crushed rock is already imported, principally from the South West, East Midlands, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Norway. Without a further local source, more material would arrive by sea, rail and road before being hauled onwards—often by HGV—to where it’s needed. The council’s carbon assessment estimated 15-year transport emissions of about 198,804 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent for a Somerset supply scenario and 636,037 tonnes for imports from Norway.

France was identified as a possible source during the 2013 public inquiry. Spain has also cropped up in the wider public argument, but it isn’t identified as a supply source in the current KCC evidence reviewed for this article, so it shouldn’t be presented as settled fact. Wherever the stone comes from, it still has to be quarried, processed, landed or unloaded and carried to its destination. The environmental bill doesn’t vanish at Dover; it merely changes address.

There is an economic bill too. KCC’s papers say the quarry operator estimates that closure could put 140 direct jobs at risk, with indirect work spread across a supply chain involving around 400 companies. Quarrying, engineering, haulage, processing, training and apprenticeships would be displaced elsewhere in Britain or abroad. In plain English, Kent could save its woodland while exporting some of the jobs and environmental damage to somebody else’s backyard.

That doesn’t automatically justify sacrificing Oaken Wood. Economic benefit isn’t a magic wand which makes an irreplaceable habitat replaceable. But nor can the jobs, transport emissions and need for construction material be brushed under the carpet because they make the environmental argument uncomfortable.

Between a rock and a green place

Cllr Antony Hook summed up the dilemma neatly when he said councillors were caught “between a rock and a green place”. He chose the green place, arguing that stone could be brought from elsewhere but ancient woodland couldn’t. Other councillors reached the opposite conclusion: that the case should be tested independently rather than killed off at County Hall.

The real weakness in KCC’s case isn’t that imports carry no consequences—they plainly do. It is whether the council has proved that destroying this particular woodland is the only credible answer. Two calls for sites produced only Gallagher’s land, but a call for volunteers isn’t necessarily the same as a comprehensive search for the least damaging geological option. Opponents point to other ragstone deposits and safeguarded land potentially being lost to housing. KCC and its advisers say no suitable and deliverable alternative has been identified. That dispute now sits at the very centre of the examination.

There are no spotless hands here. Quarry Oaken Wood and Kent destroys a habitat it officially accepts is irreplaceable. Refuse it without securing another supply and Kent risks more imports, more transport emissions, higher costs and local jobs drifting elsewhere.

What KCC did on 16 July wasn’t to approve the quarry. It did, however, decide by the slender margin of six votes that quarrying beneath Oaken Wood remained acceptable in principle and deserved to move forward. After thirteen years of argument, the axe still hasn’t fallen—but it is no longer resting quite so far from the tree.

Have a story that needs telling, or information you think may interest us? Please get in touch. All correspondence will be treated in the strictest confidence.  TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me

The Shepway Vox Team

Not Owned By Hedgefunds Or Barons