 29th May 2013. Application has been REFUSED at the planning committee meeting. Reasons for the refusal (minutes of the Planning Committee meeting) can be seen here 12th January 2012. Sainsbury's
have submitted an outline planning application for a large 50,000sq ft, out of
town supermarket at the Nurden's Garden Centre site. Based on a
preliminary review of this major planning application, the committee
of the Malmesbury and St Paul Without Residents' Association
recommend opposing the application for the reasons presented below.
Malmesbury
has become a Front Runner town to develop a Neighbourhood Plan under
the Government's Localism Act, which will present a community vision
for the implementation of any future developmentin and around the
town. Consequently the application from Sainsbury’s is premature
prior to the development of this Neighbourhood Plan.
In
March 2011, a Town Centre and Retail Study commissioned by Wiltshire
Council, and carried out by expert consultants GVA Grimley, concluded
‘Our
study has not identified any need for further out of centre
development to come forward in any centre and on this basis the
Council should seek to resist any proposals that would cause
detrimental impact on the trading performance of any of Wiltshire’s
centres’.
The Study also concluded that Malmesbury could support further
Convenience Goods capacity of only 209sq m by 2015, the Sainsburys
application is for a store with a retail floor area of 2,744sq m,
over 10 times larger than this recommendation. The Study assessed the
ratio of convenience stores to total store numbers, and identified
that Malmesbury has only 1.16% fewer convenience stores than the
national average, this is not conclusive evidence of the need for
further convenience store development.
Sainbsury’s
themselves comment that they intend that 12.5% of their floor area
would be non-food sales. However the company are publically on record
as stating that they aim to increase non food sales by 45%. There has
been no study of the impact of non-food sales on the viability and
vibrancy of Malmesbury’s iconic High Street.
We
believe that Malmesbury’s historic and traditional High Street is
one of the key factors giving it strength of community cohesion, and
making the town such an attractive place to live. As such we oppose
developments which threaten these community strengths.
Our
studies of the mass of documents submitted as Sainsbury's planning
application are ongoing, and we will be circulating a more detailed
assessment of this application in the near future. Our responses to
the Sainsburys application, and the other major planning applications
submitted by Waitrose for a supermarket on the Avon Mills site, and
Gleeson for 180 houses and land for a primary school at Filands will
follow and will be placed on MSPWRA
web site.
We
urge you to submit your views on the Sainsbury's planning application
(11/04092/OUT) to Wiltshire Council, in writing or via Wiltshire
Councils web site.
The Council is legally obliged to consider all views up to the date
of a planning decision, which has not yet been determined. We also
recommend that you include in your comments that you intend to attend
the Northern Area Planning Committee where the decision will be taken
and that you want this committee to meet in Malmesbury.
Finally
we recommend that you also email your comments on the application the
all the members of the Northern Area Planning Committee; their email
addresses can be found on our website. To see all documents relating to the application, click here To see Wilts Council summary statistics of comments submitted, click here |
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