Chamber of Commerce's Unexpected Letter

The St Albans Review and Observer this week carries a somewhat bizarre letter from Sandra Oldfield of the St Albans Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber contains a number of active supporters of Stop Tesco, and we'd heard that on average members were against the Tesco development. You can see here for example that a debate the Chamber held with the elusive Michael Kissman of Tesco present produced a range of views, with the tenants of the Maltings development for example being '60:40 against' the development.

Despite this and with no apparent evidence, the letter from the Chamber suddenly accuses 'interest groups' opposed to Tesco of 'blatantly closing all communication with Tesco's management' and suggests they talk to the supermarket giant to 'improve areas of concern'.

Assuming that Stop Tesco is one of these 'groups' there are couple of problems with this.

Firstly, local residents would love to talk to Tesco but they've not been communicating at all with us - we've had one mailshot (with at least one glaring error), a couple of hours of a roadshow and three comments in the local press in FIVE months! (And we know Tesco's hired lobbyists have talked to local politicians - but that doesn't help us much).

We've sent Tesco lots of letters and emails in reply. We would really like Mr Kissman and his colleagues to attend a public meeting where local people could tell them their concerns about the project.

Secondly, we don't want to 'improve areas of concern' - we want to use the Eversheds site for housing, a school or other community uses. There are enough examples on this website of situations where Tesco has expanded a small store in both size and range of services for us to be very wary of any negotiation. (Another one is here today, from the Oxford Mail!).

Thirdly, Ms Oldfield says, incredibly, that 'almost all of the feedback from local business has been positive'. Our own survey of local businesses shows that, of the over 200 we've interviewed, more than 80% are opposed to the development*. The minutes of the Chamber's own debate showed many businesspeople concerned about different aspects of the development and 60% of the shops in the Maltings centre opposed for a start! A number of local businesses are actively collecting signatures for our petition - does she think they are in favour?

We'll be writing back to the Review and Observer this week - can we also urge any members of the Chamber of Commerce who support our campaign to make their views known to Ms Oldfield. On average, each new supermarket causes the loss of 276 local retail jobs - how can the Chamber of Commerce want this?


*the survey will be completed in a couple of weeks and then we'll post the findings in full here, not just highly selective interpretations - such as Tesco's numerically-challenged claim that,
'there's a half-and-half split between those who support our proposals and those who don't'