6 March 2008 - The Green Party has said that the City Council should focus its efforts on winning the appeal against Tesco, rather than encouraging the company to submit a fresh application for the Unthank Road site or not fighting the appeal.
At today's meeting of the Norwich City Council Planning Committee, the Council Chief Executive Laura McGillivray presented councillors with a report on matters arising from the Council's rejection of the latest Tesco application in January. In the report, Phil Kirby (Chief Planner at Broadland District Council) outlined three options for the Council to consider on the way forward regarding the applications for the site and the likely appeal by Tesco on the latest rejection:
Councillor Adrian Ramsay, Co-ordinator of the Green Party Group on Norwich City Council, said: "The only acceptable way forward is for the Council to mount a strong defence of its decision to reject the application. This will require engaging an independent consultant. The next step should be to ask a consultant to analyse the latest application, planning report and reasons for refusal and to make recommendations on how the Council should best approach the appeal.
"It would be totally unacceptable for the Council to encourage a fresh application by Tesco. A convenience store on that site would cause congestion, safety and parking problems whether on-site car parking was provided or not. The City Council's planning officers made a clear and strong case for rejecting the first three applications by Tesco for this site. Their reasons included the safety implications of bringing more delivery lorries to a congested and narrow street. That has not changed with this latest application. The Planning Committee recognises that, as do the 425 people who wrote in to the Council to object to the latest application (14 people wrote in to support it).
"The Green Councillors will continue to press the other parties to support the option for the Council to mount a strong defence of the committee's decision. To pursue any other option would be to ignore the democratic will of the Planning Committee and the overwhelming majority view in the Unthank Road area against having a convenience store on that site. The Council needs to send a clear message that it will stand by its decisions and fight them at appeal if necessary - not roll over when large developers threaten an appeal."
At today's meeting, Planning Committee councillors noted the options in the report. The report stated that "the Chief Executive and [political group] Leaders need to agree how this case should be taken forward having regard to the three options identified."
The officer report to the Planning Committee meeting of 31 March 2005 stated:
"The restricted nature of the site results in servicing arrangements which are too tight for ease and safety of use, particularly given the numbers and frequency of deliveries and size of vehicles. The hours of delivery and anticipated problems with servicing are likely to result in noise disturbance to neighbours, which cannot be adequately overcome by planning conditions."
The officer report to the Planning Committee meeting of 16 March 2006 stated:
"The nature of the business is that there are several daily deliveries to the site (at least five, including HGVs and vans). The former petrol filling station by contrast only had a limited number of deliveries."
A full copy of Mr Kirby's report is available here (PDF).