Ledbury Town Council votes in support of the Aldi application

The final decision, however, lies with Herefordshire Council's planning committee.

The application came before the full town council at a meeting in the Methodist Church Hall off The Homend, on Thursday April 7, which was also attended by around 15 members of the public.

A total of 13 town councillors voted in support of the application, with four abstaining and one against.

Cllr Andrew Warmington, the ward councillor for Ledbury West on Herefordshire Council, had already indicated he would abstain.

But opening the debate among the councillors, he spoke in detail on the application and revealed he was broadly in favour of the New Mills site for the supermarket, because an alternative site at Lawnside was not, in his view, "deliverable".

Under planning law, through a complicated process called "sequential testing", a site closer to the town centre must be preferred to an 'out of town' site, and if Lawnside can be shown to be a "deliverable" site for a supermarket, then Herefordshire Council's planning committee would have grounds for rejecting the site favoured by Aldi, on the New Mills industrial estate, off Ledbury bypass.

But Cllr Warmington, speaking at the meeting, said of the Aldi application: "I'm pretty broadly in favour of it".

He said: "Lawnside is not available for development. There are formidable obstacles. The Brewery pub cannot move. The Community Hall could move, but it is a very well-used site, used by the people of Ledbury."

He pointed out that Halo Leisure was to begin an major redevelopment of the swimming pool complex at Lawnside, "for a 20 year life".

He added: "That leaves Lawnside car park, and we have a town that is desperately short of car parking space. Clearly, this is not a viable site."

He welcomed Aldi's promise of 35 new jobs as "positive".

And Cllr Warmington recognised that the public mood was in favour of the development.

He said: "What I have sensed so far is that public opinion is very much in favour."

But Ledbury's mayor, Cllr Annette Crowe, said she could not vote in favour of the new supermarket.

Cllr Crowe, who is also a Homend trader, said: "I've talked to people in the town centre. One lady said she had two shops there and if the supermarket is built she will close them both.

"I won't be supporting this application."

Member of the public, Fran Robinson, who was a food web researcher in Ledbury for a Council for the Protection of Rural England study, several years ago, said that Ledbury still had "a really good food web" in terms of local suppliers sending produce to local shops, and she added: "The issue here is not a supermarket but an out of town supermarket. Local shops depend on footfall."

She said: "Out of town supermarkets have destroyed the centre of other towns and in Ledbury many farms depend on those town centre outlets. If you close the main market, they cannot survive.

"People who come to Ledbury come for the independent shops, and because it has a lively, vibrant, community atmosphere. Aldi anticipates taking one third of customers away from Ledbury town centre; but even if is is 10 per cent, there are very few businesses which could sustain that loss."

The major of town councillors, however, were in favour of the Aldi proposal.

Cllr Tony Bradford said: "The reality is that we in Ledbury have been shopping out of Ledbury for at least 30 years. I support this application. There are many, many good things going to come out of this."

Cllr Jayne Roberts said that if people saved money shopping at Aldi "they would have more money to spend in the town".

If Aldi comes to the New Mills site, the adjacent Galebreaker site, which owns the land the supermarket will be built on, will be able to expand.

Cllr Bob Barnes welcomed the promise of 15 new jobs for Galebreaker, as well as the 35 promised by Aldi.

He said: "Fifty jobs will change the lives of 50 people; and this is not an out of town supermarket; it's an edge of town convenience store."