Lidl lose the first battle, but they can still win the war

Last Wednesday Nailsea Town Council sat to discus Lidl’s application and vote to recommend either approval or rejection of the application to North Somerset Council. After a summary of the public meeting the previous Friday, comments from the public in attendance and comments from the councillors themselves, a vote was taken on the proposal that, to paraphrase, while the council is not opposed to Lidl coming to Nailsea they are recommending that the application be refused. The proposal was unanimously approved.

 While this is clearly a positive step it is not the end. The council does not have the power to approve or reject the application, only make recommendations to North Somerset Council who do. Some important points were made by the councillors that I hope will make North Somerset agree with the Council’s decision. The most interesting of these were: 

• Tower House Medical still had not been approached by anyone from Lidl to discuss the impact of the construction and functioning of the proposed store, a state of affairs one councillor called ‘extraordinary’.
•  The council, who owns Station Road (the potential renovation of which Lidl dropped as a ‘bombshell’ at the public meeting as a means of mitigating the parking space losses), has not been approached by Lidl regarding their plans, a rather important necessity if they are to carry out their proposal. 
• Applications for new stores require parking plans to increase capacity yet this proposal reduces it. 
• The husband of one councillor is an HGV driver and in his professional opinion the proposed delivery plan is unworkable. 
• There’s been no consideration of the impact on Christ Church. 
• The plans are ‘abysmal’ – one councillor sad that in his working life he has looked at a lot of ‘strange’ planning applications but this one ‘takes the biscuit’.

While I agreed with much that the councillors said (which surprised me greatly if I’m totally honest) there were a couple of things I bristled at. Both were age-related. The first was a point made by several councillors that most of the complaints were from old people. One even said that the public in attendance were all over 50 but retracted his comment after I piped up. While I agree that most of those in attendance at both the meeting the previous Friday and the council meeting itself were of a, shall we say, mature, disposition, I think it’s erroneous to extrapolate from this to say that only that specific demographic is against Lidl’s proposal.

Firstly, from what I have seen, older people are generally more engaged in politics (which is why politicians talk a lot about protecting pensions but still seem of the opinion that young people are just delinquents-in-waiting). They have a greater expectation that their voice will be heard and considered, and are less demoralised with politicians and politics as a whole. The result of this is that younger people may feel as passionately about the store as the older people but have less expectation that their feelings will make any difference. Around a million people protested against the Iraq war and what good did it do? I don’t mean to compare the Iraq war with Lidl, my point is that if such a massive expression of views can be summarily ignored by those in power then what hope does a few people in a town have against a multinational like Lidl?

Secondly, older people often have fewer demands on their time. How many parents with kids are going to pay for a babysitter to go and attend a public meeting on a Friday night? If they’ve gone to that trouble and expense they’re going to do it for a night out, not to sit in a gym on uncomfortable chairs for an hour.

The final point is that Nailsea has an ageing demographic. The average age of residents of Nailsea is mid-40s. In my lifetime I’ve seen several schools close or merge due to declining need while the number of nursing homes is dramatically increasing. If Nailsea has a high proportion of older residents is it any surprise that the majority of people engaged in the debate over Lidl are advanced in years?

The second comment was that Nailsea needs Lidl because it will help keep young people here. This seems to be overestimating the pull of a supermarket when young people decide where to live. What would help more in bringing young people to Nailsea would be to reduce house prices. According to RightMove, last year the average price of a house in Nailsea was around £262,000. Even terraced properties were over £200,000. What sort of young person setting out on the property ladder can afford that much money? Even if they have a deposit, employment contracts are such that it is difficult to get a mortgage as many people cannot guarantee earnings long-term. This is obviously a bigger problem than is in North Somerset’s limited power to solve but it is also beyond the abilities of a supermarket to solve as well. The idea that Lidl can single-handedly reverse the ageing and declining demography of Nailsea is, frankly, laughable.

All-in-all, the meeting was interesting and I was pleased with the outcome but I am yet to be convinced that Lidl's presence will be of benefit to Nailsea and I feel the councillors are putting to much faith in the rejuvenating power of a budget supermarket.