Sometimes, it is in the pauses, in the absence of utterance or action, that things are at their clearest.
 
There was a searing moment in last week's town council meeting (18.1.17) when wide eyed Liz Harvey, town and county councillor, looked around with her hands outstretched and asked if anyone was going to answer her questions. The tension and embarrassment in the ensuing silence, as well as the realisation of a long buried truth, froze that crowded room. See 1.07 in the video below.
 
It came down to this. The months and years of bickering and bluster, all the outbursts of anger, the denunciations, the contemptuous asides and tortuous complaints, they were all distilled into a single dizzying moment of collective insight.
 
For Ledbury's troubled Neighbourhood Plan, there seems to be no real reason why things have happened as they have, why money was spent on this or that, why moves were made or not, who was in charge or ultimately should be responsible. At the heart of it all, the project is aimless and inchoate. There is a void. The only imperative is to get the bloody thing done - or be done with the bloody thing. Anything will do.
 
At this special town council meeting to examine progress on the town's Neighbourhood Plan and plot a future course, it was clear that events are unfolding in a way that is dislocated from detailed planning, informed discussion or the application of available professional expertise. There is no project manager it emerges. Financial forecasts of income and expenditure don't exist. Records of key discussions are not being kept. The town council which bears legal and financial responsibility, is in ignorance, nor has it been consulted at critical moments as laid down in its own rules. Nobody is in charge. The buck stops nowhere and with no-one.
 
Most damning of all, Ledbury's residents either do not know about the Neighbourhood Plan and what it means for their future, or don't care. Either way, the efforts at communication and interaction with local people have failed miserably. 
 
Non Erit Sollicitum
 
The evening started well enough. There had been an upbeat and informative progress report from consultant Sally Tagg, followed by an impassioned defence of the project by local resident Phillip Howells. He carefully rebutted criticisms that levels of community engagement were poor, saying that Ledbury's apathy was normal in these situations. Equally, costs were nothing extraordinary, given the complexity of the task, and the size of the town.  He said everything was open, above board and fully accountable. He appealed to commonsense, as a good citizen, an ex-soldier, and a professional. Really?
 
Things began to unravel. There was no round of applause. Liz Harvey got to her feet and after thanking Mrs Tagg and Mr Howells, asked the same questions she had been asking for the last twelve months.
 
The technicalities of planning policy are never rivetting. But the impact of planning decisions on people's lives is immeasurable: where a road should go, whether a view is ruined, if a school is built, or a supermarket allowed. In planning matters there are always winners - usually property developers - and losers, usually the neighbours. We elect local councillors largely to oversee a legal and fair planning process, to call decision-makers to account. In planning matters, scrutiny and 'due process' matter.
 
Over the months and years, Harvey and others (including me) have been branded trouble-makers for asking awkward, potentially embarrassing questions about the way the Neighbourhood Plan was being handled. Nor are the worries and concerns diminishing, but acquiring greater urgency as more money is spent, as the intellectual gaps are widening, and the inconsistencies becoming more egregious.
 
Tempus Fugit
 
And so once again as she ran the script, sought to get answers, the town council hierarchy and their hangers-on, sighed and shifted impatiently. After ten minutes by the clock, the mayor, Debbie Baker had had enough and told Harvey to stop talking as she'd had fifteen minutes 'from what we timed it'.
 
Why had there been a 'call for sites' while a planning appeal for new housing in Ledbury was underway? Did not the NP group think it was a risky move to invite local landowners to offer up their land for building at the same moment as barristers for a predatory development company were arguing the case in a planning court that Herefordshire needed to allow more house-building?
 
Even though there had been a call for development sites, Harvey noted that at least two landowners had been ignored by the Neighbourhood Plan after proposing seemingly viable schemes for housing and transport infrastructure.

Why had housebuilder Bovis been rebuffed when it sought a meeting with the NP group to discuss its plans south of the by-pass? Why had the Neighbourhood Plan not undertaken a public consultation on 'Development Options' as it is required to do in the official guidance? Who is project-managing the process? And so on.
 
Lacunae

New councillor Nina Shields lamented the poor response rates to the costly consultation events overseen by the consultants. Cllr Andrew Warmington wondered why the town council was not being kept better informed. Cllr Nick Morris wanted to know whether the key officer for Neighbourhood Planning at Herefordshire Council was being consulted. Cllr Andrew Harrison asked if the town council could have a monthly financial and project report. Liz Harvey questioned whether the NP group was acting in line with its terms of reference as decided by the Town Council in October 2015, particularly in sanctioning consultation events.
 
Well? Is anyone going to answer my questions, she said again. Silence.

To be continued...

Notes
​Cato the Younger: a fascinating life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Younger

Liz Harvey's written questions on the Neighbourhood Plan to Ledbury mayor, Debbie Baker 20 January 2017. Click file here.

Liz Harvey's covering email to Debbie Baker. Click file here.

Video of LTC meeting, 18 January 2017 to discuss Neighbourhood Plan.

News that planning permission has been granted to predatory housing developer Gladman Developments to build 321 houses on green fields to the south of Ledbury has been greeted with dismay and disbelief in the town.

Now a precedent has been set to build beyond Ledbury's southern by-pass, there's nothing to stop other schemes also being given the go-ahead. Already, Bovis has proposed a 625 house estate on land adjoining the Gloucester Road roundabout, up the hill from the Gladman scheme. 

Both of these developments are in addition to the 600 houses proposed in the Council's Core Strategy for north of the viaduct and the 100 houses already granted permission on the Cricket field by the Full Pitcher. 

Ledbury is well on its way to another two thousand houses, despite the Core Strategy proposing only 800 units for the town up to 2030.  

Ledbury Ward Councillor today issued a stinging rebuke for Ledbury Town Council for delaying progress on the Neighbourhood Plan. She said:

"This is a very concerning decision. It makes a nonsense of the effort we have all gone to in shaping the county council’s planning policies for Ledbury and demonstrates the damage that the Town Council has done to the town in dragging its heels for so long on the Neighbourhood Plan.

"There is nothing good about the Gladman development as far as I’m concerned. It detracts from the functionality of our bypass, makes it difficult and dangerous for young people to get to school and to sports facilities on foot and by bike from the site, it damages our landscape setting, it is the first development to actually reduce our sustainability as a community, it brings with it no employment land and it delivers us absolutely nothing in terms of community facilities.

The likelihood is that government changes to the definition of ‘affordable housing’ will mean that only a fraction of the homes which eventually get built will be truly affordable for local people; and the minimum build standards required by council policies mean that the houses will be much more expensive to live in and to heat than need be the case.

In addition it will call into doubt whether the cricket pitch site ever comes forward for development, which in turn will reduce the likelihood that a new cricket facility is built in the town.

I hope the councillors who have deliberately hampered the progress of the Neighbourhood Plan since its inception and have most recently led the scheme to pull the plug on it altogether feel proud of themselves. These councillors have acted selfishly and through their actions have denied the community a voice on the future for Ledbury. In doing so, they have rendered the Neighbourhood Plan all but irrelevant.

I was ashamed to be asked to defend these councillors’ actions to the inspector in the appeal hearing. Dissolving the Neighbourhood Plan working group was a gift to Gladmans. The timing could not have been better for Gladmans and worse for Ledbury.

What many people don’t seem to realise is that the Gladman development will be in addition to the viaduct site, not instead of it. Neither will it reduce in any way the number of houses to be built to the north. Both this sites will come forward before the Neighbourhood Plan is able to wield any influence. It will be down to ward members working with planners to get the best outcomes for the town now.

Heaven only knows what was in the mind of the Mayor when she sanctioned a call for further development sites throughout the town only last month at a cost of a further unbudgeted £5,000 on the Neighbourhood Plan account. How much more development does Cllr Crowe want to see here in Ledbury?

The most ironic part of all this is that these two huge developments will both be approved ahead of the introduction of Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) – the government’s new local development tax … so the Town Council won’t get a penny of CIL money from either of these developments … which formed such a large part of their motivation for undertaking Neighbourhood Planning in the first place.

​I hope these councillors see the sense of putting aside their petty interests and small town politics. Ledbury is in peril and I would hope that everyone who cares about the town will start to work for our collective good."
​

People continue to wonder why Ledbury Town Council is sloshing so much public money the way of the Foxley Tagg Partnership.
 
While other places put out a modest press release announcing a ‘call for sites’ as part of their Neighbourhood Plans, Ledbury has commissioned consultants to do this at a cost of five thousand pounds.
 
As one Neighbourhood Plan ‘insider’ commented off the record, it’s money for old rope.
 
The call for sites is understood to be one of the 'tickbox' stages needed to complete a Neighbourhood Plan. Not a legal requirement, it gives local landowners the chance to have any parcels of ground they own considered for building development. This is not a complicated exercise. It might involve a press statement, a press advertisement, even a personal letter to landowners.
 
It requires no specialist expertise nor should it cost five thousand pounds.
 
While members of the community go to Ledbury Town Council cap in hand, and get put through the mill for a few hundred quid to support genuinely worthwhile projects, Mrs Sally Tagg and Co bask in civic munificence, money no object.  How much are we paying her in total? Fifty, sixty thousand pounds?
 
It was a different story last September (2015) when the now disbanded Neighbourhood Plan team of community volunteers (at least three of whom were marketing professionals) sought ‘permission’ to produce a newsletter to publicise the project.
 
Then, under the pretence of cost-cutting and good management, town councillors shaved a miserable few hundred pounds off the newsletter budget. Instead of its being printed as an A3 tabloid newsletter, they stupidly decided it should be half that size, effectively rendering it illegible and from a marketing point of view, hardly fit for purpose.
 
The volunteers dug in and refused to have their names associated with such an exercise in incompetence. The designs went in the bin. It felt like a calculated act of sabotage. All those expressions of wanting ‘good value for council tax payers’ were hollow words.
 
When Mrs Tagg shakes her head and mutters dubiously, that’s not part of the original contract, we’ll need extra money for this or that, the shady powers that be in Ledbury Town Council sit up like a pack of well trained Jack Russells and say how much?
 
I ask once again: why is the Foxley Tagg Partnership being paid so much money for our Neighbourhood Plan?

​2015 was a special year for Ledbury Town Council. There was, for the first time in a very long time, an election for all its members. A sprinkling of new faces who appeared in the Council heralded fresh thinking and enthusiasm. Did it live up to its promise? Did the lights of democracy finally flicker into life?
 
After the rifts and bitterness of the previous year's Barnes’ mayoralty, Annette Crowe swept into the Mayor’s seat like a latter-day Brunhilde, pledged to bring people together, to sow happiness, and introduce a new era of openness and democratic transparency.  At her Civic Service, Handel’s majestic coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, rang out in a burst of hope and joy. While she and her friends were thrilled, not everyone was suitably impressed with this regal musical offering. Eyebrows were also raised when invitations went out for the ‘Mayor’s Glitz and Glamour’ Ball, a hefty £45 a head taking place at Alexander Park, half way to Hereford.
 
But despite these minor off-key gaffes, hopes were high that Annette’s reign could only bring better things to the Council. God knows, they surely couldn’t get any worse after her predecessor. Could they?
 
Yes they could.
 
The last twelve months has surely to rank as the most ineffectual and unimpressive term of mayoral office since… well, the year before, as it happens, during Bob Barnes’ inglorious turn with the plate chain. And that is saying a lot.
 
Reviewing positive achievements coming of Ledbury Town Council’s efforts is an undeniable challenge, particularly so this year.
No Room.
There is one. In the teeth of seething opposition from the Old Guard, some council meetings have been relocated to disabled-accessible venues. Being charitable, it’s a step in the right direction. Mind you, for as many meetings that have taken place away the Market House, an equal number have remained there. How so?
 
Personally, that shabby upstairs room has never appealed: from the throne-like dais upon which the Mayor and her lackeys grandly comport themselves, the steep dark stairs, the amateurishly arranged pictures and wonky displays, to its dingy lighting and impossible acoustics, the place reeks of oppressive tradition, a throw-back to the 1850s when it was done out as a meeting room. It is not a comfortable space. Yes the Market House is an icon of Ledbury – but for all the wrong reasons.
 
Why is the Council still using a room that is completely off-limits to anyone who can’t manage stairs or struggles with their hearing, a room that is impervious to good quality sound and video recording? I think we know the answer to that question, but I asked this anyway at a Council meeting and was told condescendingly how very hard it is to find suitable meeting rooms in Ledbury. I wanted to argue the point, but despair overcame me.

There are two problems. Why hasn’t a venue roster for the next four years of the Council been drawn up? From the various church halls, the Community Hall, St Katherine’s, the Burgage Hall and school assembly halls, surely a range of vacant slots can be identified? If not immediately – let’s not get too excited - at least the town might expect that sometime in the yawning future all meetings will happen at ground level. Not yet it seems. No financial provision has been made for room bookings in the coming year. Also, no arrangements have been made to reserve a regular slot in accessible rooms as and when they become available.
 
The plain fact is that Ledbury Town Council has no interest in making itself accessible to the community.  Annette Crowe’s early enthusiasm for this easiest of projects has all but petered out.  No stars awarded.

​This brings us to the second point. Ledbury needs more community meeting facilities. So what consideration has the Council given to this subject? None. In a couple of years’ time, Ledbury’s population could have grown by several thousand souls. The pressure on facilities will become more intense. For a town of its size, Ledbury is pitifully short of meeting, performance and rehearsal spaces. Who cares? Not the Council. It’s too busy running the cemetery (at a financial loss) and other traditional ‘maintenance’ pastimes that occupy all its efforts and imagination.
Unneighbourly Behaviour.
As usual in the face of such pressing questions, Ledbury Town Council prefers to look inwards and spend a lot time fiddling with itself. The Neighbourhood Plan could have been the vehicle to identify locations for town centre assembly rooms catering to young and old together, bigger and better than we have now. There is public money to support such projects. Look at Bishops Frome’s splendid new village centre.
 
Alas, the volunteers sustaining Ledury’s Neighbourhood Plan, running with such revolutionary ideas, were given the sack in October 2015. At that embarrassing Council meeting, Cllr Rob Yeoman applied a dose of political ‘Agent’ Orange to the green shoots of community activism after the disconsolate years with dreary Bob Barnes at the helm of the project
 
The Ledbury Spring: it couldn’t last. In a right-wing coup that would have gladdened a junta of geriatric generals, the Council control freaks snatched it all back. It was an act of vindictive nihilism.  What a stupid thing to do.
 
Cllr Yeoman bemoaned the slow progress and unruly behaviour of the Neighbourhood Plan team. We needed progress, and professionalism, he said, and fast. Consultants would manage the Plan henceforth and in the interests of efficiency, select the best people to work with.
 
Five months later and where are we? Nowhere. Not a thing of substance has been achieved since the coup. I lie, for the budget for the Plan has been raised from £20 thousand to an eye-watering £70 thousand, most of that going the way of consultants, the Foxley Tagg Partnership. The completion date has been pushed back to sometime around 2018 – long after the major housing developments for the town will have been set in stone. That will mean the project has been in progress for seven long years. Why, some of the original members may tragically have passed on by then.
Building Spree.
There has been a ‘call for sites’ with advertisements taken out in the local press in which landowners have been asked to come forward and have their fields and meadows considered for building plots. Not wishing to be too hyperbolic, can I just say that this is an OUTRAGE. Ledbury’s Neighbourhood Plan has no need to consider additional housing on top of the already confirmed Viaduct site (600 homes), the Cricket Pitch (100 homes) and the likely redevelopment of the Football Ground (about 60 homes), the outstanding possibility of Gladman appeal being upheld (321 houses) and the 50+ homes which have already been built in the parish since the clock started ticking in 2011 on the town’s housing growth target of 800 homes by 2031.
 
Given that Ledbury has already more than fulfilled its housing quota up to 2030, why the hell is Mrs Sally Tagg, a development consultant with strong links to the housebuilding industry, being paid an additional £5,000 of public money to solicit further bids from landowners for even more housing? Are the people of Ledbury aware that we have a circle of consultants and town councillors who seem intent on building way more houses than even the development hungry Herefordshire Council has allocated for us? Possibly not: external communications with the community have been typically inadequate and ineffective.
Lacklustre.
In other news, the Town Council ruled out the running of the public toilets in Bye Street. It also refused, until a couple of weeks ago, to share grass-cutting duties with Herefordshire Council, long after every other parish and town in the County had felt it necessary to do so. It refused the opportunity for funding from Herefordshire Council to fill potholes locally. It rebuffed an approach from the police for a ground-breaking burglary deterrent project for the whole town. It has even had to hand back getting on for £8,000 of grant funding which was there to PAY the council to consult with local people. No progress has been made on taking on the running (and income from) any of the town centre car-parks, again, unlike other local market towns. Even the apparent ‘gift’ of a piece of public art is seeing the council surprised by the need for several thousand pounds of public money to be spent on its installation.
 
Out of control traffic continues to upset and endanger local residents. Nothing has been done to tackle this, despite firm proposals being put forward for a traffic management survey to be undertaken. A local resident is fuming that his offer to pay for a speed survey in New Street has been repeatedly rejected by the Town Clerk.
 
Democratic participation: no progress.
 
Ledbury’s miserable markets continue to occupy much time and energy in meetings and working groups, but with little success to show. It’s not difficult to get a good market off the ground. Towns and cities are doing it all over the world, have been for a few thousand years now. Once again, in this town, we continue to miss the mark.
Steady as she goes.
So, Ledbury Town Council’s annual budget of £320 thousand continues to be spent in the way that it always has. Forty per cent of it goes on running the town council itself (see analysis).  It employs a large staff who are apparently rushed off their feet. But what are they doing most of the time? Seemingly running the Council… meetings, minutes, administration, lots of bureaucracy while maintaining a comfortable existence in their cosy, expensive-to-run offices in Church Street. Most of the rest is spent on looking after the Rec, some grounds maintenance in Dog Hill, and subsidising the cemetery – things it has been doing since it first began; plus ça change.
 
Financial regulations are left unreformed. There are still glaring holes in the way the Neighbourhood Plan is being managed. None of the recommendations made by last year’s official auditor have been enacted.
 
It’s not that we have high expectations, or begrudge the wages of Town Council staff, the frustration is that so little happens of consequence as a result of them. What are we getting for our money?

If Ledbury Town Council ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone notice? Would there be an outcry? Would our quality of life be diminished? I don’t think so. Let’s face it, alternative, much cheaper arrangements not requiring the expensive apparatus of democracy, could be put in place to cut the grass and dig the graves.
 
When you come to look at Ledbury Town Council’s year, there is not a lot to look at, beyond the business-as-usual back-stabbing, the amateurish disregard for rules and due process, the steady drip-drip of poison emanating from shady political groupings, oh, and the deadening cloak of incompetence that seems to attend everything it ever does. How is it that a group of mainly clever, thoughtful, good-hearted people can turn themselves into such a shower?
 
All the grandiose trappings of our town council, are at best an irrelevance, sometimes a nuisance, but mostly a complete waste of time. Buck up people. 
 
The trouble with rising town council tax demands is not so much the 11% percentage increase on the Council Tax bill (which in real terms represents just 65p every month), but the poor value that local people receive from their investment in local services. If we got more for our money and had a town council which worked successfully to bring investment, jobs and extra funding into the town, people like Mr John Worby (Letters, Ledbury Reporter, 25 March) wouldn’t feel quite so much like he was being taken for a mug. 

I get criticised for speaking my mind – which is fair enough. If you start throwing brickbats around, expect them to get lobbed back in your direction. Even so, there are times when straight talk is needed. Like now.

Our challenges are many, and urgent... 


The cuts in services by Herefordshire Council - grass cutting, libraries, public loos, floral displays, care of the elderly, street cleaning and more - are biting deep into the well-being our community. 

Unplanned building development is putting unprecedented pressure on our town. Whatever happens, Ledbury will grow by thousands of people over the next few years, placing increasing stress on local services. Are we ready for that? Already the town’s primary school is oversubscribed, and many local children have to travel to outlying village schools which is inconvenient and provokes resentment.

The UBL Heinekin closure – with the loss of over 100 local jobs - is a reminder that Ledbury simply must get to work and attract business investment. The town’s economy is massively unbalanced with a very unhealthy outflow of daily commuters and pitifully few good, well-paid, secure positions on offer within the town itself.

Deadbury?

For a town of its size, we are not well-endowed with leisure and creative facilities – performance spaces, diverse sports facilities, rehearsal and recording rooms, meeting places, year round festivals and community events. Why else should our lovely town have attracted the hurtful soubriquet, Deadbury? Yes there is great work and tremendous energy put in from diverse voluntary efforts, but Ledbury as a whole lacks infrastructure and investment on a long-term planned basis.

Other towns have been hoovering up Lottery funding, grants and business sector sponsorship. Not so Ledbury…  Where has been the leadership, the vision, the sheer brass neck to make shift happen?

We need, collectively to wake up – not just to the threats, but to the abundant opportunities which surround us. The time is now.

Priorities

Sometimes it’s hard to be constructive, to think of ways that the current Ledbury Town Council ‘administration’ could adapt and evolve in order to rise to the challenges it faces.

A good start might be to convene an open honest discussion among town councillors about the future, what’s working and what isn’t - an Awayday or Retreat. This shouldn’t be a formal council meeting but run on more business-like lines with an independent facilitator. Such a gathering might at least help to create some esprit de corps, a coherent vision on the things upon which we are agreed.

Differences of opinion and competing perspectives are always helpful. The trouble is with places like Ledbury Town Council, such conversations are stilted affairs, taking place in the adversarial bear pit of Council meetings under the glare of the press. This has two consequences. Free debate is stifled, particularly among the quieter and more thoughtful members, and is wont to provoke intemperate behaviour from their more unbridled colleagues. What emerges is a distorted version of reality. The Town Council does not speak for the town. Come to that, the Town Council does not really speak for the Town Council. The messages that emerge are from the loudest and most strident voices, those picked up by the press because they make a good quote or a scandalous headline.

Fit for Purpose

The other huge impediment to progress is the Town Council’s sheer lack of vision and dynamism. It’s not that all its members are without talent and imagination, far from it. The shame is that so many of its precious human resources are wasted, much less exploited.  As an organisation, the Town Council in its current modus operandi, is singularly unfit for purpose in terms of its being able to deliver positively, generously and in timely fashion on Ledbury’s current challenges and opportunities. (The Neighbourhood Plan is a case in point: unhurried to the point of irresponsibility, the finished document is at least a year away.)

But never mind the next fifteen or five years, what for instance are the Town Council’s priorities for the next twelve months? Where is it going to be focusing its energies?  What outcomes is it seeking by the May 2015 election? Who is going to do what? Wouldn’t these be good starting points for the forthcoming budget-setting exercise and a necessary precursor to the democratic process?

Any successful organisation has a corporate plan at least. Ledbury Town Council does not – and the results are painfully obvious. There is drift, incoherence, frustration and an absence of concerted effort on the things that really matter.

Ledbury needs action. Ledbury Town Council needs a strategy. Urgently.

When property developer Mr Philip King last summer unveiled his plans for a superstore on Lawnside Road, his audience of town councillors and general public gasped in disbelief. It’ll never happen, they said, the planners will never let it happen. Really?

There are of course so many good reasons why a 30 thousand square foot superstore on Lawnside would be terrible news for Ledbury. Traffic concerns and goods vehicle access in an already congested Bye Street, and the demolition of several important community buildings would seem to be showstoppers for Mr King. And, like the out of town Sainsbury’s which was rejected two years ago, the sheer size of the development exceeds the Council’s own estimates of retail capacity in the town stretching far into the future. Game set and match to Ledbury then. Or is it?

Inconveniently for Ledbury, Mr King has got lots of planning trump cards up his sleeve. In efforts to stimulate the economy, Government has introduced new very relaxed planning rules which presume in favour of building development whatever, wherever. Mr Pickles, the minister in charge of planning, has also restated his absolute commitment to a ‘Town Centres First’ policy, preferring retail developments to be clustered in or near town centres, and not like Sainsbury’s last Ledbury offensive, on the edge or out of town.  For all its free-market free-for-all planning bluster, the top planners do seem to have retained a shred of commitment to stopping the High Street rot. Thanks must go to valiant Mary Portas and her town centre crusade for that.

So on planning grounds, a superstore for Lawnside is looking good for King. It’s town centre retail. It’s not going to drain footfall from the High Street, at least by official definitions. It’s building development.  From the planning viewpoint, what’s not to like?

Traffic has to be one of the big impediments. But even here, planners and highways engineers have cunning ways. We could see all kinds of creative solutions: parking restrictions down Lower Road, a one way system, lorry access along a service road parallel with the Town Trail, traffic lights at the Homend/Bye Street junction.  Anyway, who’s to say that there’s going to be that much extra traffic? Mr King might argue that Ledbury is supposed to be trying to get more shoppers into the centre of town, not less.

The swimming pool and community hall issue is easily disposed of. Out of the massive profits that such a lucrative superstore development would yield in the long term, Mr King will happily toss a few million quid into a new cheap and nasty sports-swimming-community facility, either on a portion of the Rec, or a bit further out. Does he care?  Herefordshire Council appear to be willing participants in the plan. Rumours at first denied, but now semi-official, suggest that King has agreed to take over the running costs of the swimming pool for an interim six months plus getting the Council to defer its refurbishment plans, pending the planning application outcome. It’s an ideal arrangement for a bankrupt Herefordshire Council.

Meantime, Fire Service chiefs are busy running down the service, with the loss of one standing fire tender and would, it seems happily move out of centre if the price were right. Ditto the other landlords affected. Let’s not also forget Mr King has already snapped up the Ambulance Station.  Right now, he must be smiling in anticipation.

But there is a glimmer of hope. There is one cogent argument against this proposal that may sway the planning committee. It is the matter of its sheer massive volume.

Mr King’s superstore at Lawnside Road of 30 thousand square feet is of identical dimensions to that proposed by Sainsbury’s a mile out of town on the by-pass. This was turned down decisively by planners because it would damage the economic vitality of the town centre by overwhelming the town’s retail capacity - an opinion confirmed in five separate studies by retail planning experts.  There is just not enough retail business to go round to support what we have in Ledbury already, plus another superstore bigger than the existing Coop and Tesco stores combined.

A 30 thousand square foot superstore monster – whether on Lawnside or the by-pass - is just too big for our small town. Think of it this way. The proposed shed would comfortably hold every living person in Ledbury without their touching each other. At a stroke it would more than double our existing supermarket provision. Where is all that extra business going to come from? And this at a time when the ‘Big Four’ supermarket operators are rapidly moving away from out of town superstore development into town centre convenience store formats. In case anyone hadn’t noticed, the retail economy is just about as flat as a supermarket car-park.

There are many people in Ledbury who would welcome a makeover in Lawnside Road. With imagination and sensitivity, the area could be transformed into a fine-looking, high quality environment for community use, modest independent retail provision and provide for some much needed apartment style housing.  And it could still accommodate a swimming pool and a new community hall.  Why can’t we have our cake and eat it?

Rather than one big faceless out-of-date-before-it’s-even-built supermarket shed, why doesn’t Mr King pick up the phone and have a chat with people about some different options, positive solutions, things that add to rather than subtract from Ledbury’s delights.

He might still make a mint on his speculative property deal – but at least Ledbury might not get sold down the river in the process.