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PLANS by supermarket giant Sainsbury’s to open a new store in Omagh have been hit with fresh opposition – this time from Retail NI, the representative body for independent retailers across the North.
Retail NI has formally objected to the multi-million-pound proposal at the Great Northern Retail Park, sharply criticising the traffic and parking data submitted with the planning application.
The group says the figures contain ‘glaring errors’ and fail to reflect the true impact the development would have on one of Omagh’s busiest junctions.
Fermanagh and Omagh District Council had hoped to issue a recommendation on the application next month, but this now looks set to slip into the New Year amid ongoing concerns from both DFI Roads and Retail NI over traffic modelling and parking capacity.
Retail NI claims the transport assessment prepared for Sainsbury’s is ‘unrepresentative’ of the retail park and surrounding road network, including the already congested A5 corridor.
“We are aware of existing localised queuing at this junction and want to know what evidence has been provided to demonstrate a nil-net detriment on traffic and parking,” the group said.
They also questioned why the application relied on figures recorded during the pandemic, stating that traffic surveys from the Costa drive-through in 2021 ‘cannot be relied upon’ and are now out of date.
Furthermore, a recent snapshot parking survey carried out on October 24 and 25 has been dismissed by the organisation as ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’.
Retail NI also agreed with DFI Roads that comparator surveys at Sainsbury’s stores in England had ‘no physical or functional comparison’ with Omagh, and warned that parking provision at the retail park is insufficient for a store of the proposed scale.
In a significant escalation, the group has also threatened to report Fermanagh and Omagh District Council to the Northern Ireland Audit Office.
They allege key documents and evidence from linked planning files are missing from the online planning portal for this application.
Sainsbury’s has said the development would create around 110 jobs, including 75 full-time posts.
