Summary:
A retail development is easier to get through planning in a town than a village environment.
Size matters! National guidelines require larger developments to go through a formal “retail impact assessment” (RIA) in a village site but not in a town. An adverse assessment (“it will hurt local shops”) is likely to kill a retail application.
Kilo (and M & S) are therefore, for their own ends, doing their best to portray Claygate as a town (or part of Esher town) rather than a village in all their public statements and publicity material.
We should not have to be forced to defend our village’s status. It has never been known or seen as anything other than a village.
This plan is therefore about much more than a large food store being imposed on Claygate: it is about our future status as a village. What could follow?
EBC & Kilo Properties & their planning consultants (First Plan & Forty Shillings) appear to be trying their best to hijack the narrative by repeatedly referring to Claygate as a 'town' or part of Esher town centre in all of their information updates both online and in hard copy.
The flyer which landed on residents doormats today (14/8/23), show an aerial shot of Claygate with a dotted line running around the centre of Claygate, the Parade and including the TLCP as sitting inside ‘the town centre boundary’.
Why is this important?
Kilo Properties & their planning consultants, have previous form in securing approval for 'out of town' retail developments for M&S, Waitrose, Cineworld etc. typically located on retail or industrial parks located on major ring roads on the outskirts of places such as Newbury or Wells and have managed to secure approval for similar sized food stores in other towns, such as Walton-on-the-Naze, partly due to not having to provide a Retail Impact Assessment and thus avoiding any evidence to suggest the store will harm the town centre vitality and viability.
We believe this is disingenuous at best and should and will be continually challenged by our Campaign and the community.
The Claygate Can Do Better Campaign has continually called for a Retail Impact Assessment to be done and have questioned why EBC have NOT insisted one be produced!
If our community had not united after the village hall meeting on 21st July 2023, this WOULD have gone to Planning Application (as the CPC next steps on their slides showed) and we all would have struggled to have objected.
We call on the Claygate Parish Council (CPC), as we raised in questions at the CPC meeting on 10th August 2023, to insist and add their formal corporate weight to the insistence by the community for the EBC to undertake a full, independent Retail Impact Assessment on this project, as well as the Full Options Appraisal. Thank you CPC!
More on this topic tomorrow.
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