A plan to build a new retail park on the outskirts of Exeter are back for a fourth time.
The CPG scheme for the Moor Exchange has been resubmitted following the non-determination by Exeter City Council’s planning committee of a near identical scheme in July, Devon Live reported.
Councillors voted by seven votes to four against a recommendation of officers to approve the plans, but councillors then failed to actually vote on reasons for refusal, leaving CPG deciding that the application was undetermined.
A letter with the resubmitted application says that the Committee were minded to refuse planning permission without clear and substantive reasons for not following the Officers’ advice and recommendation.
It adds: “That was a most unsatisfactory outcome for both the Council and my clients, and for which reason my clients decided that the application should remain undetermined, and therefore they had no option but to withdraw it.”
Two previous plans to build on the site on land North of Honiton Road and West of Fitzroy Road, near the Sowton Industrial Estate had been refused by planners – one back in November 2015 and a second smaller scheme in August 2018.
The third scheme, smaller again, and one that included ‘more facilities for the local community’, was left undetermined by July’s meeting.
This fourth scheme still includes Next, M&S Simply Food, Boots, a drive-through McDonalds, a drive-through Costa as tenants. The other eight units would be filled with a yet-to-be-named discount food retailer, a post office, a newsagent, a bank, a gym, a restaurant, a hot food takeaway unit and a shop, and reduces the overall floorspace of the development by 13 per cent from the August 2018 scheme that was refused.
