Tesco Invites You To Have Your Say Online - Shame their website doesn't work

In a letter to the Herts Advertiser this week, Tesco Spokesman Michael Kissman wrote:

"We leafleted 5,000 homes in the locality and our website - www.tescostalbans.co.uk - features a "have-your-say" section for people to give their opinions, which we value."

Tesco values YOUR views soooo much that the "have-your-say" page Mr. Kissman mentions in his letter, the very page where you are supposed to use to voice your support or objection to the scheme, is broken and has been for at least a day. Well, that's one way to make sure there are no objections...

Earlier today, we received this email from a local resident who tried to have his say about the Tesco plans:

I just tried to submit my opinion on the Tesco development at http://www.tescostalbans.co.uk/comments.html and when I clicked the 'Submit' button, the webpage is unavailable. I wonder how long this has been the case and whether it would have anything to do with Tesco being bothered in the slightest about hearing local resident's opinion.

Anyway, as I can't send these comments to Tesco via their website, here is a copy of my comments (I unsurprisingly voted 'No'):


I am totally against another supermarket within the St Albans area. I already have 15 supermarkets of varying sizes within 10 minutes drive, including 3 Tesco stores (Town centre, Jersey Farm and Hatfield). I am also unhappy with the way that Tesco have allowed this area to become derelict and disused over the past 5 years or so. How do you justify destroying listed buildings, especially as the site has already been identified for residential development?

Finally, why not publish the results of this poll on your website, along with local resident's opinions? I suspect that Tesco are simply going through the motions in a pretence that they are interested in public opinion.

Regards,

David Ablett
Colney Heath Lane
St Albans


We tried the website ourselves a few minutes ago and what happened? Well, the "have your say" form page appeared fine and we were able to complete it without problems. Here's the page we saw:



But when we hit the submit button we got a page that says "Not Found: The requested URL was not found on this server". We couldn't quite believe it had happened so we tried two other browsers (safari, mozilla and firefox) but got the same error:



Have your say? We've already shown, here on this website, that Tesco cares so much about it's "consultation" with local people that it didn't bother to change it's public statements telling us that and used the same one they used previously in another town.

Does that sound like a company that actually cares what you have to say?

Now we've discovered that the have-your-say form on their website, an important mechanism for collecting local opinion, is broken. How's that for meaningful public consultation?