Residents Against Lidl on Elvetham

If you live in Hart you’ve probably heard about the planning application to build a Lidl food store, with a drive thru on Elvetham Heath. With the spiralling cost of living, more competition among local supermarkets to help keep food prices as low as possible can only be a good thing. And, it would be great for this competition to come in the form of a conveniently located store with free parking. Understandably, anyone who lives close to the proposed site will be concerned about direct impacts such as additional traffic congestion, road safety, noise, and light pollution. And, along with people who live further afield they have concerns about broader environmental and sustainability issues that indirectly affect us all. Fortunately, according to the government’s Plain English guide to the Planning System , our planning system is designed to “ensure that the right development happens in the right place at the right time, benefiting communities and the economy.”. Decisions on planning ...

We need everyone to submit their objection comments. You only need to add your comment to the portal, or send an email. It only needs to be short. You do not need to write a long, detailed document like the ones linked to below (unless you want to!). Feel free to use the ideas, but it is not good practice to simply copy and paste. Try to come up with your own objections, or express them in different ways.                                                                                                                                                    ...

The applicant claims the equivalent of 25 full time positions will be created. One of the arguments in support of Lidl is that it will create jobs. It’s as though there are hundreds of shop assistants and shelf stackers waiting to snap up these lucrative jobs! The reality is that existing local retailers are struggling to attract and retain staff. And how many jobs will be lost as the town centre decays into a ghost town?

Sir Euan Hamilton Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe is the sole director of Madaket Ltd, the company that owns the former park and ride site. He probably spent lots of money on his dodgy Transport Assessment. The scary thing is that many of these monstrous, inappropriate developments actually go ahead on the basis of these copy and paste hack jobs! That's why it's so important to post your objection comment. Read our guide .

The consultants leading the proposal to build a Lidl supermarket and drive through claim that “Part of the site is previously developed and is termed ‘brownfield’. It is generally favourable for new development to be located on brownfield land because it has previously been developed on.” What does “Brownfield” mean? According to the National Planning Policy Framework, brownfield land is “Land which is or was occupied by a permanent structure, including the curtilage of the developed land (although it should not be assumed that the whole of the curtilage should be developed) and any associated fixed surface infrastructure.” What is a Brownfield Land Register? Local planning authorities in England are required to maintain and publish registers of brownfield land suitable for housing. Brownfield land registers were introduced to encourage residential development on brownfield sites to reduce the development of greenfield sites for housing. They enable planning authorities to trigger a gr...

Even if you believe the contrived trip rates, generated from traffic surveys conducted with Covid restrictions in place, you surely can't believe that up to 85% of Lidl customers would have been passing through the Heath anyway?

The applicant’s claim that the plan will not lead to traffic chaos is based on a forecast for the number of cars passing that would have been passing by the site anyway and therefore are not making new journeys. The Transport Assessment (TA) quotes a research report - TRICS Research Report 14/1 entitled ‘Pass-by & Diverted Trips’. According to Gordon Stokes, visiting research associate in the Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford, this report concludes that “pass-by and diverted trip rates need to be set with regard to analysis of the local situation and in discussion with Local Authorities”. ( https://www.gordonstokes.co.uk/transp-ta/passby.html ) The TA refers to other unspecified research to claim that ‘convenience’ type stores are likely to experience 72% pass-by or diverted trips. Perhaps coincidentally, an average pass-by rate of 72% is often quoted from Ghezawi,RS, Wegmann FJ and Chatterjee A (1998) Convenience Store Trip Generation, Institution of Transport Eng...

The plan claims a drive-through coffee shop close to the M40 near Banbury is a representative site. What do you think?   The Costa is 1 minute from the M40... ...down a dual carriageway... ...off a large main road. Hmmm 😔

The applicant’s Retail Impact Assessment shows that Lidl’s total comparison turnover is expected to be £2.16m, out of a total of £11.02m. In other words, Lidl expects almost 20% of its sales to come from non-food and grocery items. Yet, the Transport Assessment states “The store would potentially include some electrical and homeware items, but these would be somewhat limited and ad-hoc in nature.”. This incongruent data is used to help justify the claim that 72% of traffic to the store will be passing by anyway and therefore will not contribute to additional congestion!

Did Hampshire County Council really agree to the trip rates? “Trip rates” are used to estimate the contribution a new development will make to traffic volumes. They are extracted from a database of traffic surveys conducted at comparable locations around the UK. Of course any surveys conducted during Covid restrictions will show a lower-than-usual level of traffic. Almost half (nine out of twenty) of the surveys used by the Lidl applicant to generate its trip rates were conducted while Covid restrictions were in place! This completely discredits the claim that there would be no significant impact to the local road network!

The applicant’s conclusion that “…there is sufficient retail and food/beverage capacity in Fleet to support the proposed food store…” is not supported by its data, which shows a 489 sqm capacity deficit, even when using the upper bound for forecast capacity in 2027. Convenience goods floorspace capacities in 2027 (RLTCS and applicant’s data): Floorspace capacity (upper bound) = 1854 sqm (Retail Impact Assessment para. 2.15, accounting for Sainsbury's Hook) less Aldi, Church Crookham, -1329 sqm (Retail Impact Assessment Table 7A) less Lidl, Elvetham Heath, -1014 sqm (Retail Impact Assessment Table 7A) Net capacity = -489 sqm With the massive shift to online grocery shopping, if the referenced study were conducted today, it would undoubtedly show a lower capacity for convenience goods floorspace, so the true deficit is even worse.

Mathematical models can be great tools when applied correctly. But a model is only useful if it’s predicted outcomes are similar to those observed in real life. The applicant’s Transport Assessment claims the plan would not have a big impact on the traffic through the Heath, partly justified by mathematically modelling junction behaviour. The problem is that the junction modelling considers each junction individually. It does not consider the local road network as a whole. Local residents are all too familiar with the queues that form at peak times from the Fleet Road/ Elvetham Heath Road and Fleet Road/ Elvetham Road roundabouts, through the Elvetham Heath Way/ Mounts Way roundabout, all the way through and beyond the Morrisons roundabout. This is how it is in real life. The links between the junctions are relatively short and so traffic regularly blocks back to upstream junctions. This means the flow and waiting times predicted by modelling these junctions individually do not reflect...

The planning documents describe the drive through as “for the sale of food and drink principally to visiting members of the public where consumption of that food and drink is mostly undertaken on the premises.” Surely the idea of a drive through is for people to buy food and drink for consumption off the premises? If consumption of food and drink will mostly be undertaken on the premises then why is it described as a drive through, and why does it need traffic to flow around and through it? The planning committee must see through this shameless attempt to deceive for profit at the expense of our environment and quality of life!

The landowner’s Retail Impact Assessment forecasts that by 2026, with Aldi/Home Bargains Church Crookham and Sainsbury’s Hook, the town centre supermarket trade will reduce by almost 10%. We can’t do anything about that. Add Lidl Elvetham Heath and the town centre supermarket trade will have reduced by 12% in 2026. One thing’s for sure. If this goes ahead it won’t do any good for other town centre businesses that rely on people popping in during their regular supermarket visits!

As part of the justification for selecting an out of town centre site, the developer asserts that the drive through plan cannot be “disaggregated”, or considered separately. The argument is that a drive through needs vehicles to have easy access and flow through the site. Therefore there is no commercially viable town centre location for the development. If the drive through cannot be disaggregated by the planning decision makers, then why has it been disaggregated by the developer, and submitted as an outline plan only? Surely for a decision to be made on the application then the full plans for the drive through must be included?