Town Council consider Tesco application.

The Tenbury Town Council met tonight to consider the application to demolish the existing buildings on the cattle market site and the application to build a Tesco's "Environmental format" store.

There were a good number (25-30?) of people in the public gallery, but they were not allowed the participate in the meeting. The Town Cllrs have been taking written and verbal submissions from numerous people over the last few weeks. The one fact that has become clear is that there is no overall majority either for or against the store.

The meeting tonight was to discuss the proposal purely on planning grounds, and whilst this restricted what Cllrs could say, it produced a more focused result.

The main issues raised were:-

• Concern about the additional volume of vehicles in town.
• Concern about the effect that this would have on the bridge.
  (Should there be a weight limit?)
• Concern about the access to the site and the conflict between Spar delivery traffic and all traffic entering and leaving the Tesco site.
• Concern over the conflict between pedestrians and delivery vehicles at the entrance and within the car park area.
• Concern that the building was bland and not in keeping with the architecture of the town.
• Concerns about light pollution.
• Concerns that two hours free parking was insufficient to encourage people to also visit other shops in town.
• Concern about the visual aspect created on entering the town.
• Query whether the 180 jobs were local or included the whole supply chain.
• Acknowledgement that a lot of people locally already support Tesco either by visiting stores in Ludlow, Kidderminster or elsewhere or by having home delivery.

  (The exact wording of their submission will be available on the MHDC planning website in a few days.)

Three Cllrs declared an interest as either an employee of a Tesco competitor or as an employee of a supplier to Tesco.