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Author Topic: Tesco / ASDA !!!  (Read 701721 times)

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Dave

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1523 on: March 14, 2012, 10:59:27 PM »
Yes, but what they would earn is small beer, especially in the current financial climate.  It would certainly be nowhere near the millions they need to finance a new build. 

Duke Fame

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1522 on: March 14, 2012, 10:09:06 PM »
No doubt the college (or rather, its consultants) has done the investment appraisal, and their plan to demolish and rebuild has presumably come out with a with a positive NPV.  But the college would not be permitted to borrow more than about 40% of turnover, so they will need to sell the land to raise the capital. 

Or work at improving turnover and cutting overheads. Can they pay their staff less? Can they run more attractive and premium business courses?

Dave

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1521 on: March 14, 2012, 08:17:37 PM »
Victor, it isn't as simple as that. The YPLA has different levels of funding for different qualifications, depending on how costly they are to deliver. If they didn't no college could ever afford to offer lab-based courses!

admin

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1520 on: March 14, 2012, 07:00:13 PM »
Miss M,

I think that I've explained it before - briefly its all to do with MIA castrating the local politicians and raising the profile of the situation  with the Council Leader, so that it becomes a political issue.

If I go into it in detail, I'll bore everybody even more than I normally do then Belly and Dave will start battering me with planning laws - which I know in theory are correct and I also know that they are both intelligent, sensible guys but they don't ponder much on the political...which has a big influence. Belly has already threatened me with Big Eric Pickles and he said that he'll "call me in" - or was it out, I'm not sure and Dave said that he's going to make me understand ..."how further education works". Next I'll be the subject of one of Amazon's poetic assaults or Mrs O will leap onto me from that tree she's hiding in or maybe even Heritage will spit out yet another dummy in my direction.

I could take all that as long as Lisa doesn't start relegating my posts again because I 've just made friends with her after being on the losing end of an icy stand -off wherein she proved beyond doubt that I was completely irrelevant...why did I say that - she'll relegate this now.  So Miss M, I'd love to explain again - but I think that I'd better go down the pub....Not the Ringer.              

First of all, why do you believe that Marple Area Committee will not be able to decide a planning application for a supermarket? As I understand it three Councillors have declared their position and will therefore not be able to take part in the decision process and three haven't. Why will the three who have kept an open mind on the issue not be able to decide on their own?

I must also add that your repeated public pokes at Lisa are beginning to annoy me and if you persist in doing this then I am going to conclude that you must be an apparition and bar you. Please don't debate this with me in this thread as it will be removed. You are welcome to PM me if you wish to discuss it further.
Mark Whittaker
The Marple Website

Victor M

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1519 on: March 14, 2012, 06:30:20 PM »
Quote
As far as closing courses (or relocating them to Cheadle) is concerned, it's important to understand how further education works. Colleges are funded per student enrolment. They are suffering cuts in the unit of funding which require significant belt-tightening, job losses etc. The one thing no college does, especially in such a challenging financial climate, is close viable courses, because to do so is to turn down desperately needed cash!
Dave you know as well as I do that there are certain courses that cost a lot more to put on than others, one way of maximising your revenue streams is to make sure that the courses you put on are the cheapest to run. i.e. Don't need any complex equipment, don't need laboratory technicians (science courses), can accommodate maximum number of students per teacher (mainly humanities), don't need large classrooms (like Art based courses). So the course maybe viable but not generate as much cash as something else (apprentice type course).

finetimefontaine

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1518 on: March 14, 2012, 06:05:09 PM »
Miss M,

I think that I've explained it before - briefly its all to do with MIA castrating the local politicians and raising the profile of the situation  with the Council Leader, so that it becomes a political issue.

If I go into it in detail, I'll bore everybody even more than I normally do then Belly and Dave will start battering me with planning laws - which I know in theory are correct and I also know that they are both intelligent, sensible guys but they don't ponder much on the political...which has a big influence. Belly has already threatened me with Big Eric Pickles and he said that he'll "call me in" - or was it out, I'm not sure and Dave said that he's going to make me understand ..."how further education works". Next I'll be the subject of one of Amazon's poetic assaults or Mrs O will leap onto me from that tree she's hiding in or maybe even Heritage will spit out yet another dummy in my direction.

I could take all that as long as Lisa doesn't start relegating my posts again because I 've just made friends with her after being on the losing end of an icy stand -off wherein she proved beyond doubt that I was completely irrelevant...why did I say that - she'll relegate this now.  So Miss M, I'd love to explain again - but I think that I'd better go down the pub....Not the Ringer.             

Miss Marple

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1517 on: March 14, 2012, 05:19:50 PM »
Miss M, I presume that when you say "we", you mean MIA and considering that MIA have been three steps behind the political process so far then its quite a feat that you are now ..."really one step ahead". I'd be interested to know how, but I suppose if you told me... then you'd have to kill me.


Finetime can you explain why you feel MIA have been three steps behind  :-\

Lisa Oldham

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1516 on: March 14, 2012, 05:06:38 PM »
I really really hope that the planning committee base this decision on politics if they say yes because that would be fantastic.  sure a judical Review under those circumstances would be extremely easy to win just based on them ignoring national planning regulations and clearly openly ignoring the local plan.. would be brilliant!!

However it wont happen..

Dave

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1515 on: March 14, 2012, 05:05:25 PM »
Finetime, you need to read what belly wrote about what happens when local authority departs from its own LDF.
As far as closing courses (or relocating them to Cheadle) is concerned, it's important to understand how further education works. Colleges are funded per student enrolment. They are suffering cuts in the unit of funding which require significant belt-tightening, job losses etc. The one thing no college does, especially in such a challenging financial climate, is close viable courses, because to do so is to turn down desperately needed cash!

finetimefontaine

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1514 on: March 14, 2012, 04:41:16 PM »
Dave,

As I'm sure you know there are sixty -  three Councillors in Stockport. Most of them couldn't care less about CAMSFC. Most of them couldn't care less about Asda. With the exception perhaps of 8/10 of them, they couldn't care less about Marple. What they do care about are their political aims and games.

I'm not saying what they'll do. All I'm saying saying is that there is no point in quoting the Council's LDF, that won't stop ASDA, that won't stop anything especially if it becomes a political issue. Go to any Council chamber and you'll see party politics at work.

 At the time of writing , the Planning Committee consists of 11 Councillors: 6 Libdems, 2 Labour and 3 Conservative. One of the Libdems is our own Councillor Kev, the Libdems will probably let him lead on it because of his local political knowledge and they'll always support their own. Whereas the other parties will very often go against the Libdems - for no other reason than it is the LibDems.

If the Committee sat tonight and Councillor Kev was opposed to the ASDA ( I dont know that this is true ) then the application would almost certainly be rejected - but come the election the Committee will  have a different political make-up and if Councillor Kev is opposed to it then - they might be opposed to him - only this time they'll have the majority. Then you could have planning consent by September.  

Victor M

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1513 on: March 14, 2012, 04:17:46 PM »
Dave, the problem is that there won't be any reduction following the transfer to the single site in Marple, that reduction will already have taken place in financial years 2011-12 & 2012-13. Also if you look at the last minutes available the Chair of Governor's has asked if it is possible to undertake the changes in this financial year. Now why do you think they want the reductions brought forward? If you look at the courses that use to be offerred at both campuses and now are only offerred at one (Cheadle) why is it that Cheadle always appears to be the beneficiary?

Belly

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1512 on: March 14, 2012, 04:09:27 PM »
I could not agree more Finetime !   Everything in my opinion has been staged and planned until after the elections, I am sure some of the suits think we are stupid, but believe me we really are one step ahead  ;)
Dave, the fact that Hibbert Lane has been zoned for housing in the Council's LDF, and your right it has, offers no guarantees at all that it can't be used for retail. What it probably guarantees is that the Planning Officers will recommend refusal to ASDA but we are not dealing with officers who have planning agendas we are dealing with politicians who have political one's. Elected members have been overuling Officers for years and there is nothing to say that they won't do it here. If it suits them they'll throw the LDF out of the window without even opening it. The power here is with the Councillors not the Officers nor the LDF.  If they refuse permission then ASDA can appeal as you say but if they grant it - that is it...game...set and match. 

Thats not strictly true finetime.

If land is allocated for one use in the local plan / ldf, the local authority just can't give planning approval for a totally different land use. It can 'recommend' such an approval, but it would have to be advertised as a 'departure from the plan' and as such has to be formally offered to the secretary of state (Mr Pickles) for him to 'call in' the application and make the decision himself. If it is called in (and there would be a half decent chance it would be, if it was approved against officer advice) then it would end up at a 'call in public inquiry'. If it wasn't called in, only then could SMBC give planning approval.

Words are trains for passing through what really has no name...

Dave

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1511 on: March 14, 2012, 03:22:07 PM »
That's the problem ! Lord Hill in his last letter  to me had been assured by the YPLA that there would be no loss of curriculum if the sites merged and that plans were already being drawn up to include all curriculum lost at the Hibbert lane site in the plans for Buxton Lane.  Now I maybe a lot of things but I am no mathematician but even I can see that 2 into 1 won't go,

The trouble with a thread as loooooooooong as this one is that you do end up going round and round the same old issues!  This one is certainly an old chestnut!  To save myself the schlepp of dealing with it again, here's what I wrote last time:
I think you'll find there's ample space at Buxton Lane for the college to build what it needs, without building significantly higher than the present Buxton Lane. Also, it's important to realise that the floor area of a new building will not be as great as what they are replacing at Hibbert Lane. One of the main reasons for getting rid of Hibbert Lane is that is used very inefficiently, because it was built as a secondary school. Consequently, many of the rooms are the wrong size: schools have nice neat classes of 30 kids - 6th form colleges don't: far from it! So the new building, being purpose built, should be quite a bit smaller.

I've mentioned before that I have some experience of relocating a college.  We went from two enormous old Victorian buildings to one compact purpose-built one which was a fraction of the floor area.  And there was no problem, because the new one was designed specifically for our needs.  

we are not dealing with officers who have planning agendas we are dealing with politicians who have political one's. Elected members have been overuling Officers for years and there is nothing to say that they won't do it here. If it suits them they'll throw the LDF out of the window without even opening it.

Why would it suit them?  AFAIK there is not a single councillor who has shown any support for the college's proposals. 

Harry

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1510 on: March 14, 2012, 03:07:53 PM »
Surely if attendance on a given course is so low that that course is losing money, then the only options are to consolidate onto one site, be that Cheadle or Marple, or to drop the course from the curriculum altogether. It would be absolute madness to offer a course at both Cheadle and Marple if they were both unprofitable.

The curriculum has to be constantly revised.

finetimefontaine

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Re: Tesco / ASDA !!!
« Reply #1509 on: March 14, 2012, 02:55:02 PM »
I could not agree more Finetime !   Everything in my opinion has been staged and planned until after the elections, I am sure some of the suits think we are stupid, but believe me we really are one step ahead  ;)

Miss M, I presume that when you say "we", you mean MIA and considering that MIA have been three steps behind the political process so far then its quite a feat that you are now ..."really one step ahead". I'd be interested to know how, but I suppose if you told me... then you'd have to kill me.

Dave, the fact that Hibbert Lane has been zoned for housing in the Council's LDF, and your right it has, offers no guarantees at all that it can't be used for retail. What it probably guarantees is that the Planning Officers will recommend refusal to ASDA but we are not dealing with officers who have planning agendas we are dealing with politicians who have political one's. Elected members have been overuling Officers for years and there is nothing to say that they won't do it here. If it suits them they'll throw the LDF out of the window without even opening it. The power here is with the Councillors not the Officers nor the LDF.  If they refuse permission then ASDA can appeal as you say but if they grant it - that is it...game...set and match.