CAMPAIGNERS against a plan to build a supermarket on the edge of Ludlow are calling upon people who are unhappy about the scheme to make their concerns known to planners.

Tish Dockerty, of Ludlow Chamber of Trade and the ‘Love Ludlow’ campaign, says time is running out to register objections to the supermarket plan in Rocks Green.

“By 2019 Ludlow will lose one quarter of its retail expenditure if the new supermarket is built: £12.6 million of a £50 million annual turnover," she said.

“This highly speculative planning application has no supermarket big name associated with it, which makes the applicant’s forecasts of sales in their Retail Impact Analysis highly questionable.

“Supermarkets on the whole are experiencing a reduction in sales in large out of town stores as shopping habits are changing to far more convenience based shops of which Ludlow has four already as well as the local independent stores.

“Ludlow town centre survives because the supermarkets are essentially in town and the developer’s own research indicates that most shoppers at Tesco and Aldi frequent the town’s High Street for additional shopping."

Behind the scheme is a company called Blackfriars Development Limited which is part of the Blackfriars Development Group.

It says that the area will benefit because money that currently goes out of the area to nearby towns like Leominster, Kidderminster and Shrewsbury would be retained in the Ludlow and south Shropshire area.

Blackfriars, who staged a public consultation last year, said the scheme would create more than 200 new jobs.

The developer has given a commitment that a third of the jobs would be full time and that there will be a condition to ensure that the vast majority of them go to people from Ludlow and the surrounding area.

Visitors to a consultation were told that the scheme would involve a supermarket of 25,000 sq feet making it slightly larger than the existing Tesco store in Ludlow. The site includes tree planting and extensive landscaping.

They say that the existing road network has the capacity to cope with the traffic and that a benefit of the scheme is that deliveries would not have to made by lorries going through Ludlow town centre.