While a final decision to approve the name of Market Walk is still to be ratified, B&NES Council staff have been using it as the postal address for the new Keynsham development for the last month.
As we have reported previously, the decision by council cabinet member Katie Hall not to oppose her colleague David Bellotti’s choice of name was subject to a successful call in last week. Single member cabinet decisions are usually implemented after five working days if there is no challenge. In this case however, a scrutiny panel decided last Friday (25th July) to refer the matter back to Cllr Hall. She now has ten working days to reconsider or stick by her original decision.
Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s, one of the anchor tenants in the development has four planning applications lodged with B&NES Council for various aspects of the planned supermarket and all are listed with 1 Market Walk as the address. When the applications were submitted in mid-June, they still used the development plan identification but correspondence sent by B&NES to the company from early July onwards clearly refers to 1 Market Walk.
Earlier this year, B&NES, together with Keynsham Town Council launched a consultation exercise, asking the public to suggest names. Cllr Bellotti then extended this to solicit ideas from local schools but rejected all of them in favour of his own choice. The ‘call in’ by 15 B&NES councillors was not due to the choice of name but the process by which the decision was reached. With B&NES Council as the developer, it is within its rights to name the streets. However councillors felt that in this instance, the council also had a duty to liaise with residents and the town council over a local decision of such significance.
Cllr Hall has still to respond to the scrutiny panel’s request to re-consider but the news that B&NES staff have been advising tenants of the new address for some time already, would rather suggest it will not change.
