Housing for Hook and Sainsbury’s planning application update

The Hart Local Plan that included the provision for housing development in North East Hook was rejected by the Planning Inspector, but this will not stop the development of this area. The Inspector did not believe that the Hart Local Plan had correctly determined the number of dwellings required for Hart. Hart District Council has nevertheless adopted an Interim Housing Delivery Strategy which still proposes 550 houses in North East Hook. The review forced by the Planning Inspector may even increase the target numbers for housing in Hook. If this were the case then alternative sites for development which had previously been dismissed as not economically viable could become viable, leaving Hook alone. Of course if in the meantime Hart have approved developments at Hook then it will be too late to reverse this. No specific development proposals have yet been submitted for housing in North East Hook. Please contact your District Councillors to make them aware of your ongoing opposition to this scale of development in Hook.

The Sainsbury’s planning application is still under consideration by Hart District Council. As part of this consideration, HDC commissioned an independent review of the retail statement made by Sainsbury’s. The review was completed in July but the report was only published on the planning application in November. The independent review is quite damning. Not only does it point out many errors in the retail assessment submitted by Sainsbury’s – all of which were to the advantage of the case they were making for their store – but also it states in conclusion that

“there is no quantitative need for another store as large as this in Hook. In other words, it is significantly too large for the local catchment population”.Roblox Robux Hack 2017

Furthermore, for the new Sainsbury’s to be trading at the company benchmark level for a store of this size,

“the proposed Sainsbury’s superstore would require a catchment population of about 18,000 people doing 100% of their convenience goods spending in the store”.

In fact the population of the relevant catchment area is predicted to be 21,974 in 2016, so 80% of the population in the catchment area would need to be doing all of their shopping in this single store to meet the Sainsbury’s trading target! It is therefore the case that either Sainsbury’s expect their store to put all other competing shops out of business or that they expect shoppers from far further afield to use this store, making a mockery of their already shaky transport statements.

Please contact your local elected representatives at both Parish and District level to remind them of your opposition to this development. There is a Parish Council meeting at 8pm on Wednesday 4th December, but the item is not currently on the agenda for discussion, leaving only the 10 minute rule at the start of the meeting in which to raise the matter.

Because of the way the Hart Planning Portal site works I cannot give a direct link to the document, but to read the independent review for yourselves, go to http://publicaccess.hart.gov.uk/online-applications/ and search for application number 13/01145/MAJOR. The document can be found on the Documents sorted by date order. The document was added on 19th November. It is only 8 pages but as you can see from the above extracts it makes rather interesting reading.