News. . . .
March 2nd, 2010
Supermarket Action Group highlight terminological inexactitudes in applicants letter to Town Council
Following the Town Council meeting attended by dozens of objectors plus Kevin Davies with an Owen Banks planning consultant, a letter was sent to the Town Council from the Owen Banks consultant on behalf of Kevin Davies trying to clarifying their position. The letter has now been published on the Town Councils website and can be downloaded here as a MS Word document.
The Supermarket Action Group have responded robustly to many of the claims made in this letter and have laid them out in detail in their own letter to the Town Council. Their letter can be read on this website by clicking here.
Well done Newcastle Emlyn! I have just been looking at your website and the amount of work that your Action Group has put in is very impressive. We here in Narberth, traders and individuals, are facing a similar application currently with Pembs CC for a Co-op Supermarket via their planning applicants company. They have produced very wordy professional booklets full of half truths about traffic, shopping, local support etc.
The work you have done will help us in forming our own response Thank you
Phil Edwards
I wonder if you have a link to the actual N.L.P reports, as we in Oswestry are fighting against 4 supermarket plans, which 3 are out of town, but all 4 are above the size we need. we had the planning meeting on the 18/3/10, and lucky we managed to get it deferred for 3 months. our site is Http:// http://www.oswestry21.com . good luck with your fight.
Kevin, there is no link to the NLP reports. NLP has produced a “Retail Survey” for the county which will be used as part of the input into the county’s new LDP. A number of information requests have been made to get disclosure of this information, but the county council has so far refused. Appeals are pending. The council’s argument is that if it released this data, it would show developers where there are potential “hot spots” for new retail development, and so releasing the data would damage the environment. This argument is more than somewhat undermined by the fact that all of the main external planning consultants round here seem to know what the retail survey says – it’s only the council tax payers that are not allowed to know.
Each time the council receives a major retail planning application, it pays NLP to review the application against the Retail Survey, and what NLP says helps the planning officers to make a recommendation. We know for a fact that these reviews were made available to the applicants and their agents, but once again the council did not want the public to see them. Eventually they did however give way.
What we get from the planning officers’ reports and the NLP reviews is a glimpse of some selectively edited information from the NLP Retail Survey, and we have challenged both the methodology used to quantify retail need and the figures quoted for existing local businesses. So far our challenges have fallen on deaf ears, with the council saying it has used NLP for years and has no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information.
If you contact the webmaster, he will arrange to put you in direct touch with me, and then we can continue this conversation without boring the rest of the world.
Richard