The End of Wye College
These and other promises made by Imperial turned out to be unreliable. In 2004, with a new Imperial Rector (Richard Sykes) they announced that the Department of Agricultural Sciences was closing, and that most teaching and research at Wye would end. In 2005 it was announced that Wye College would be converted into a research centre for non-food crops and biomass fuels, with the support, under a "concordat", of Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council. Some 12,500 jobs were promised if the research hub developed fully, but funding for the project remained uncertain, and villagers were kept in the dark about the scale of the proposals until a public meeting organised by Imperial. Opposition quickly began, and leaks of official documents (some of them held at a concealed website to avoid requests under the Freedom of Information Act) to a local campaigning website, have shown that the principal aim of the plan, particularly once an industry partner fell through, soon became to raise £100 million for Imperial projects in London by building thousands of houses and commercial developments on protected countryside around Wye that has Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) status. A new motorway link was also proposed. The plan provoked bitter opposition both locally and nationally, and was seen as a test case for other attempts to build in AONBs.
On 15 September 2006 Imperial announced that it was abandoning the plan altogether after support was withdrawn by Ashford Borough Council following widespread complaints from the public, and the publication by save-wye of a hitherto secret map showing the vast extent of the draft development proposal. The Imperial masterplan was in fact for 4,000 homes in the AONB.
This decision was hailed by environmentalists and lovers of rural Kent as a key victory to preserve the status of the AONB, and it stopped Wye from becoming a much larger town. The failed project cost Imperial at least £1 million in professional fees (and much more over the period), prompted resignations, and may be the subject of an independent legal inquiry into the actions of the local authorities involved. One legal issue was that all three parties colluded to keep the scale of their draft proposals out of the public eye. There was a project website held by management consultants from which the map of the proposal was eventually leaked.
After this debacle the nearby University of Kent agreed to run some undergraduate business management courses from the college buildings in 2007, but this proved short-lived, and Kent's School of Economics and Kent Business School now operate from its main site in Canterbury.
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