Planning application: the old butchers’ shop

A planning application (reference number 13/00333/FUL if you want to look it up) is waiting for consideration by East Cambridgeshire District Council for the old butchers’ shop in the High Street. The application is for ‘Change of use from A1 (previous Butchers Shop) to Deli with hot food retail, and installation of extraction, to include ancillary seating. Mixed usage, mainly Deli with some hot food retail – A5, A1 & A3’.

This application would allow the building to be used as a shop (A1), café (A3) – or, controversially, as a hot food takeaway (A5).  (A list of ‘use classes’ can be found here).

There is huge support for the plans outlined by the applicants to operate a deli and café in the High Street. However, the planning application as it stands would allow the applicants to change their minds and open a fish and chip shop instead, or a kebab house, or a takeaway pizza outlet, or sell the building on to anyone else to do any of those things, without any further applications being required. That would leave the building wide open to exactly the kind of use that residents have been vocal in opposing ever since the butchers ceased operation.

The parish council has, as always in the case of planning applications, been asked for its view.  It has – rightly in my view – taken the approach that while the A1 and A3 use classes would be very welcome, planning permission for A5 use would leave the village at risk of a standard takeaway-only business opening in the middle of our high street, with no further planning application being required.

As has already been said, a planning application can’t be made specific to one applicant – planning permission for a hot food takeaway would be applicable to the current applicants, or to anyone else they sold the building to. It seems to me therefore that the Parish Council is doing exactly the right thing – supporting strongly the parts of the application that would enable a deli and café to open in the high street as residents wish, but opposing the parts of the application that would leave the field open for it to become yet another takeaway.

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