Readers' letters - April 7

Re: Tesco proposed store, Penwortham.

No doubt the site chosen would be improved if the present dereliction was removed but this does not make it suitable for a supermarket.

In fact the site is totally unsuitable for the Tesco proposal for the following principal reasons:

(1) It is not in the commercial area of Penwortham which lies to the west of the junction of Cop Lane and Liverpool Road (A59).

A supermarket just outside an existing neighbourhood centre of mainly small shops and businesses will not, as has been shown elsewhere, bring trade to them but is more likely to damage their future prospects.

Competition is not, of course, a town planning matter but a damaging effect on the character of an area is.

(2) The entrance to the site for car park users from Liverpool Road can only intensify the traffic problems already experienced by motorists using the A59, which the Penwortham By-pass has dismally failed to relieve.

Although morning and afternoon/evening rush hours suffer the worst conditions, there is no part of the day when traffic flow is insignificant. (Have Tesco, South Ribble or Lancashire County Councils carried out up to date traffic counts?)

The proposed petrol filling station on site could create more difficulties than the store itself.

(3) The proposed service vehicle entrance to the site off Cop Lane is scarcely believable.

Apart from the existing traffic flow (again, has there been a recent survey?), there are peak morning and afternoon times when the school next door to the site is having pupils delivered or collected. Moreover, if service vehicles approach along Cop Lane from the south, they are travelling through an entirely residential area. It is also inevitable that a proportion of customers will use Cop Lane to access the Liverpool Road entrance.

(4) Pedestrian safety does not seem to have been considered. Pupils at the neighbouring school do not just come and go at the peak times already mentioned. And the site is opposite St Mary’s Surgery/Clinic which means the aged and/or infirm also are present on Cop Lane.

Not withstanding these objections, it has to be recognised there are residents throughout Penwortham without private transport who could benefit from additional shopping facilities accessible to them.

This does not make the present proposal any more suitable but it does suggest that the borough council should look for other possibilities elsewhere in Penwortham, even if they were to be for local shops rather than a supermarket.

G Mercer (Retired town planner and planning inspector)

Out campaign is full of fantasy

In order of importance, I am human, Christian, British, English, Prestonian, Lancastrian and European. Despite placing Europe at the bottom of the list, I think we’d be crazy to leave the EU.

Britain is not swamped with immigrants and we have control over our own borders.

Like the great Harold Wilson, 40 or 50 years ago I would have preferred for Britain to stand alone with the Commonwealth, but that would have been living in the past and, at that, a past that never existed. The ‘out’ campaign harks back to a past that never existed, lives in a present that is not real and talks of a future rooted in fantasy.

Harold Wilson, in the end, came out in favour of Europe because, as he said, “the wrong type of people would have been running the country”.

The wrong type being Tony Benn and Powell as opposed to himself and Ted Heath. In today’s world, give me the Camerons, Browns and Alan Johnsons over the Boris Johnsons and Iain Duncan Smith every day of every year.

Graham Nelson, Preston

I’d rather save NHS than EU

I agree with UKIP North West MEP Steven Woolfe’s letter (LEP April 1).

The NHS really matters far more to me than the EU.

Politicians make promises about the NHS because it is one of the few subjects the EU does not directly or indirectly control.

Politicians do not explain the reasons for the NHS deficit of £30bn by 2020.

Which will be more important to your readers when they consider how to vote in the EU referendum on June 23: paying £20bn a year, plus billions more in fines and a surcharge (£1.7bn), to the EU or supporting local NHS services?

We pay the EU enough to build a new hospital every week and 60 times more than we spend on the NHS Cancer Drug Fund. Labour and Conservative governments’ NHS Private Finance Initiatives have helped cause the deficit.

We have been mortgaging the future of our NHS over the next 20 to 30 years and making private companies rich to afford EU membership.

This is a price of EU membership voters should consider when they vote on June 23.

I would rather save our NHS than the EU from its own stupidity and waste.

This sale of our NHS will only get worse under the TTIP trade treaty between the EU and the USA, under which the British Government will be forced to allow private American companies to cherry-pick the NHS whilst the amount we pay the EU remorselessly increases if we vote to stay members.

Eric Pollitt via email

Fighting back with tariffs

I cannot understand how the Pro-EU people can try scaremongering as much as they do.

They have no proof of what they say because we are not informed of the facts, just like the last referendum under Ted Heath.

To say we will lose our lamb and other produce to Europe because of increased tariffs has not yet been threatened.

Should increased tariffs happen, then we have a bigger armoury than Germany, France and Spain all put together.

How?

Put a tariff on every BMW, Audi, VW Renault and see what happens.

Daniel Davies

Chorley