The No Clapton Tesco Campaign

Bad news I’m afraid, condition 10 has been passed – Tesco can now deliver from in front of the store.

We had prepared a load of evidence in response to that submitted by Tesco at the previous planning meeting, which we felt was inaccurate. In summary:

1. Tesco deliver much more frequently than they stated in the previous planning sub committee to this size of store.
2. The delivery bay is already in frequent use. Allowing up to 12 vehicles a day (a total of five hours of deliveries) would mean the bay is not available to other vehicles.
3. Tesco’s other local deliveries are made by larger vehicles which would not fit into the loading bay, and there is no evidence that this store would be different.
4. Danger of roll cage conflict with pedestrians is a legitimate reason for refusing planning consent, and has happened elsewhere.
5. Tesco are able to deliver in accordance with the existing planning consent.

We’d submitted it to the council’s Democratic Services department in advance, but they had unfortunately failed to pass it on to the planners or distribute it to the councillors on the planning committee. We had bought some copies along in case of this eventuality, but the Chair of the planning committee prevented us from handing them out. He also limited our speaking time to 2 minutes rather than the usual five.

So I’m afraid that the councillors didn’t get to hear our legitimate concerns, see the evidence that Tesco’s submitted evidence was untrue, nor hear the precedents where other planning committees had been refused in the same circumstances.

Good points were also made by our concerned local councillors, notably that as a public body, Hackney Council is legally obliged to act in a consistent manner. Condition 10 was imposed to ensure “that the Public Highway is available for the safe and convenient passage of vehicles and pedestrians” as the planning committee previously felt that allowing deliveries from the front of the store would compromise this. No-one there, not the chair of the committee nor Tesco’s representative could tell us what had changed with the development since the condition was impose, which does seem to indicate that that the planning committee did not act in a legally consistent manner.

But enough of this. Tesco will be opening now despite any procedural or legal technicalities. They’ll be parking in the bus stop in larger lorries than they said they’ll use. What can we do about it?

• You can take photos of them parking illegally, and either send them to us or report them to Tfl
• You can shop elsewhere. Express stores are more expensive than local stores and indeed more expensive than Hackney Tesco. And, unexpectedly, Tesco are consistently more expensive than other supermarkets except Asda.