News. . . .
8 February 2010
Cawdor Supermarket – How you can help
The new application for a supermarket on the Cawdor site in Newcastle Emlyn is due to be decided by the Planning Committee in Carmarthen on 3rd March.
Over 700 letters of objection were collected in town over the Christmas period, and many others have written their own letters. This shows that opposition to the scheme is even stronger than it was under the first application last year.
A great deal of work has been done over the last few weeks to analyse the hundreds of pages of documents submitted with the application, and a dedicated group of local people have put together a very detailed analysis of the proposal with the help of some experts in fields such as civil engineering, law and conservation. This work has identified a significant number of serious problems with the application, including conflicts with planning policies and legislation, manipulation of statistics, misrepresentation and incomplete information.
If there is any justice and the planning officers do their job properly, this application will be thrown out because it shows contempt for the people of Newcastle Emlyn, and makes a complete mockery of the planning process and the County Council.
In order to get the message home, it is important that as many people as possible write to individual members of the Planning Committee and to the Mayor of Newcastle Emlyn, Councillor Peter Lewis.
Rather than produce standard letters for people to sign and send off, it will be much more effective for people to write their own letters. They could be short letters telling the councillors how you feel and asking them to vote against the application. Alternatively, you could go into more detail about why it runs counter to both national and local policy. The choice is yours.
To help with this, we have summarised some of the main points below. There are many more examples we could give, but this would end up being a very long article if we were to include them all!
The names and addresses to write to are listed below. Councillors with a (W) by their name are happy to receive letters in Welsh, but of course you can write to them in English as well.
Impact on the local economy
The main argument put forward by the applicant is that a new supermarket on the Cawdor site would meet a strong local need and “claw back” money which local people are now spending in Carmarthen or Cardigan. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? The trouble is that there is not enough business locally to support a branch of, say, Tesco or Sainsbury without killing off our existing shops.
The application estimates that £17.9m is “leaking” from the Newcastle Emlyn catchment area, and that a new supermarket could achieve annual sales of £11.8m.
They arrive at this figure by ignoring all of the food shops in the catchment area outside Newcastle Emlyn and Drefach Felindre, so that money being spent in shops in places like Cenarth and Llandysul is treated as though it were being spent in Carmarthen. They also ignore completely the new CK’s store which is now being built in Llandysul. That will obviously reduce the amount of money available to anyone else setting up.
And finally, their estimates of the turnover of shops in Newcastle Emlyn are far too low. In some cases, the figures they quote for individual shops are less than a quarter of real takings, and overall they come up with a figure which is less than half of the true number for the town. In fact, the correctly calculated figure for “leakage” is just £8 million.
This means that in order to be viable, a new supermarket would have to set out from day one to take as much business from existing local shops as possible, and the County Council’s own consultants predicted that some businesses could lose up to half of their takings. No business could survive losses like that.
The result would be the closure of locally owned shops, loss of jobs and loss of livelihoods. For the rest of us it would mean a sad and decaying town centre and the loss of choice.
To make things worse, the estimates the application uses come from the same source used by the Council’s own consultants, and so far the Council has refused to budge and accept that their figures are wrong. However, we are confident that this time we can force the Council to sit up and listen. Watch this space!
Traffic
Anyone who lives, works or visits the town will know that our narrow streets already struggle to cope with the volume of traffic, so imagine what it would be like if we had lots more lorries, delivery vehicles and cars coming in to “Tescobury’s”.
- The application completely ignores the impact on the wider road network, and concentrates only on the junction of the Cawdor site with the main road. And even then, it uses lots of tricks to minimise the problem:
- The original traffic survey was carried out in early January 2009 when we had a period of very cold weather and icy roads. Unsurprisingly, there was not much traffic about.
- The “swept path” analysis which looks at how heavy goods vehicles get in and out of the site “forgets” to look at two of the four possible paths (right and left in, right and left out).
- While the report which deals with the impact on the local economy makes it clear that the applicant is looking for one of the large supermarket chains to come to the site, the transport assessment says that traffic figures for Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, etc. are not appropriate, and it therefore uses statistics for Lidl and Aldi to predict future traffic flows.
- No new measures are proposed to protect road safety. There would be no traffic lights, roundabouts or pedestrian crossings. Just more traffic on a route which is used by a lot of schoolchildren.
Environment
This is not just about protecting plants and animals. It’s also about human beings and their quality of life.
When was the last time you went to a supermarket which stood just a few feet from people’s houses? The proposed supermarket building would come to within inches of someone’s garden fence, and stand just a few yards from houses lived in by families with young children, pensioners and working couples.
People living around the site face a huge increase in traffic noise, day and night, air pollution from all the additional traffic, and bright lights at night. If you live anywhere in the main part of town, you will notice the difference.
That is, if your house does not fall down first, because the geology survey which accompanies the application makes it very clear that the geology of the site is very unstable. Huge numbers of piles will have to be driven to support the supermarket building itself and the northern boundary slope which drops down to the river. The piles will have to be driven to depths ranging from 15 metres to 30 metres.
Imagine what that will do to properties in the vicinity which already have problems with cracking and subsidence.
Because of the problems with land instability, the developer will not only have to pile drive the entire length of the northern boundary, but also reinforce the bottom of the slope with rock armour or gabions. This will require heavy machinery clearing the dense woodland between the slope and the river, and it just so happens that this area is both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation.
It is known that there are otters in this part of the river, and the area is home to a lot of other rare and threatened wildlife.
Despite this, the applicant says on the main application form that there will be no adverse impact on any adjacent designated conservation areas.
Please, please make your voice heard!
If you think anything that you have read here is exaggeration, you should look at the planning application. There is much more there to make your hair stand on end.
It is sometimes said that it is not worth objecting because this is a done deal, but if nobody stands up and cries foul, it certainly will be a done deal. Writing a few letters and buying a few stamps is a small price to pay to help your community, and it could make all the difference.
Hi all. This vehement campaign sadly offers nothing as to why a new supermarket could enhance & add value to NCE. I appreciate all the points made re the ecological aspects, effects on local shops etc., but why is nobody focusing on the fact that most ‘local’ shoppers use supermarkets in Carmarthen or Cardigan, or shop online? Surely a good local supermarket would attract them to shop more locally? And I remain convinced that it is the ONLY way this terrible site could be redeveloped.
The site of Cawdor Cars is the onlyone in Newcastelmlyn that will bring in more customers into the town,the worst thing that could happen is that a new supermarket is built outside the town core.If people choose to shop in NCE they can then walk through into the town centre via the archway.Any other site would be a disaster for the businesses in town.As for the people who say that no supermarket is needed,I would ask the question,where do you shop now for your main grocery shop?Thier money is better spent in NCE than Carmarthen or Cardigan.
With respect, Derrick, I think you should have a look at the planning application and the applicant’s recent letter to the Town Council. A key part of the case put forward is that it would reduce what he terms ‘surplus trading’ by the existing shops. Out of an estimated £9.8m spent in the town on convenience goods, the application earmarks £5.5m for the proposed supermarket (that’s 56% of the town’s trade). You don’t have to be Bill Gates or Alan Sugar to know that very few businesses can survive that kind of loss. One thing is certain, and that is that shops losing large volumes of business to a new competitor would have little choice but to cut staff numbers.
The other major problem with this application from a retail point of view is that while the applicant says nearly half of the store’s business would come from existing businesses, the other half would come from ‘clawing back’ business now leaking to Carmarthen and Cardigan. The problem with this argument is that the level of leakage is much lower than the applicant claims. The application firstly ignores all the shops in the catchment area it has defined and also ignores the impact of new store openings in Cardigan, Llandysul and NCE itself (Lidl is almost certain to open opposite CK’s). The result of that is that there just is not enough money left in the area to support a store of the size proposed. Of course, one of the major supermarket chains could probably grab 56% or more of existing trade, but they will struggle to get close to the target turnover of £11.8m.
The good news, from the point of view of those opposed to the plan, is that the supermarket chains are not daft. They have almost certainly done the maths for themselves and realised that there isn’t a business case. And that probably explains why the identity of the supermarket remains a mystery.
At last!! – thank you Derrick for providing a welcomed voice of reason!
Re the proposed size of the new store & some basic mathematics, CK’s at 400sq m gives us a 20m x 20m building, assuming it to be square (which I hasten to add I realise it is not, but please bear with me!)… the new store proposes a size of roughly 33m x 33m (1089 sq m), which is in realistic terms of ‘wall space’ not that much bigger is it?
How do the self proclaimed ‘Action Group’ propose to raise the millions needed to develop this site otherwise, or are they merely happy to go with the status quo (leave as is) & let this blot on the town landscape continue?
Regards, Andy
Andy, here we go again….
The numbers we have quoted all come from the application itself. There is something truly bizarre about this:
1. The application says the new store would have a net retail floorspace of 1066 sq. metres., compared with 400 sq. metres for CK’s.
2. At the Town Council meeting on 17 December, the applicant himself said that the new store would be just 10% bigger than CK’s, and that a building of the size described in the application would not fit on the site.
3. In a recent interview with the Tivyside, he said the store would be 1.5 times bigger than CK’s.
Which one is it?
It doesn’t inspire confidence in any of the other assertions made by the application, does it?
Just because a supermarket on the site would result in finance being raised to develop it doesn’t make it right. Planning permission for a bio waste incinerator, a crematorium or a small nuclear power plant would also result in big investment by someone or other, but that does not make them right for the site either.
The reality which will dawn sooner or later is almost certainly that no supermarket is interested in the site and that it is not worth anything like as much as the applicant hopes. Once that has sunk in, we may get to see more realistic plans which are sympathetic to their surroundings.