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Wednesday October 09 | 2019
Hadlow Group’s financial meltdown leads to official review of colleges A LEADING local authority executive will look into how the government monitors finances in Further Education [FE] in a direct response to the financial problems engulfing the Hadlow Group. Dame Mary Ney has been appointed to carry out an independent review of how the government monitors colleges’ financial management. The review was first announced after Hadlow College was placed into educational administration in May – the first college in the country to apply for such a status. Its sister site, West Kent College, did the same last month. YELLOW FEVER: Morgan Scott’s photograph of oil seed rape fields in Chiddingstone Causeway adorns the front of the new Tonbridge Daily Calendar for 2020. It is now on sale in shops across the town. Full story page 2
to the proposals. Eighteen councillors addressed the meeting, which was attended by around 90 members of the public, many of them Tudeley residents. Afterwards the Leader, Cllr Nicolas Heslop, said it would be better to bring TMBC’s response back and put it to Cabinet for full approval. Diane Huntingford, chair of the Tonbridge Civic Society, has written an open letter to TWBC opposing the plan. She says: “It is environmentally irresponsible to build what is in effect a new small town in an area with no existing public transport, a town whose 5,000 or so inhabitants will be
The FE Commissioner Richard Atkins said he was ‘genuinely shocked’ by what he discovered when he paid a visit to the college in May, finding that it had ‘completely run out of money’. His findings were seen in part as a failure by the Education and Standards Funding Agency, which was kept in the dark about financial irregularities. The Hadlow Group’s then principal, Paul Hannan, and his deputy Mark Lumsdon-Taylor were both suspended in February, while the chair of the board for West Kent College, Paul Dubrow, resigned. Both colleges will now be taken over by North Kent College. The administrators are in the process of completing the transaction. A spokesperson for Hadlow Group said: “The acquiring colleges have appointed advisors who the administrators have been in contact with. Now a period of due diligence
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Continued on page 2
Councillors ‘shocked and speechless’ as criticism of Tudeley housing grows By Andy Tong andy@timesoftonbridge.co.uk COUNCILLORS and the town’s Civic Society have heavily criticised proposals by Tunbridge Wells Borough Council [TWBC] to build up to 2,800 new homes in the village of Tudeley. The site, which is a mile from the edge of Tonbridge, has been earmarked for the massive development known as a ‘garden village’ as part of the TWBC draft Local Plan. The picturesque rural location on Green Belt land - which is designed to act as a buffer between urban areas has a population of around 100 but that would rise to 5,000.
A further 4,000 homes have been allocated to nearby Paddock Wood both sites are less than a mile from the border with the borough of Tonbridge & Malling. The draft Local plan, which is currently subject to a six-week consultation period that ends on November 1, stipulates the building of 13,560 homes up to 2036. These two sites would provide half of the total housing quota within a five-mile stretch of minor road, the B2017, which is due to be upgraded. An extraordinary meeting of the Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council [TMBC] Planning and Transportation Advisory Board was held at Kings Hill on October 2 to discuss how it responds
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