Sir,
I have a great deal of respect for Carol Cavill (letter to you which you published last week), but she has either misunderstood what I was saying, or she has misunderstood the advice given to her by county council officers, or both.
The point I was making in your edition of July 25 is that county councillors have had at least two opportunities to remove the damaging proposal for a supermarket at New Hedges from the new Joint Unitary Development Plan. The first opportunity was before the plan was published in the summer of 2002, and the second one was when the council considered earlier this year how to respond to the 126 objections to the proposal.
Both opportunities have been missed, and the proposal now goes to Public Inquiry early next year. The council won't have another opportunity to change the plan until the inspector has reported on the Public Inquiry.
County councillors might have been correctly advised that if they wrote in objecting to the plan, they might be barred from speaking. But I wasn't suggesting that they should have themselves written letters of objection. What I was saying, was that our local representatives should have responded to the objections and proposed in committee deleting the supermarket from the plan.
If our county councillors can't change the council's policies, what is the point of having county councillors?
As I said a couple of weeks ago, local people now have to raise a substantial sum of money to fight the case. My thanks to those who have already pledged support. The fight to save Tenby town centre will need the support of all those who objected, and indeed everybody who values local shops rather than another big supermarket.
Mike Thorne,
York House,
Lower Frog Street,
Tenby.