Mark Eastwood MP makes plea to save flagship market plans
Mark Eastwood MP says flagship projects such as Dewsbury Market should be protected as a priority to ensure the town's regeneration can progress.
Dewsbury MP, Mark Eastwood has responded to the announcement by Kirklees Council that escalating construction costs had prompted a review of the £15m Dewsbury Market scheme which involves the clearance of the entire site at Cloth Hall Street and the "decanting" of stallholders for around 17 months.
The council has advised that reviewing the scheme - one of the centrepieces of the Dewsbury Blueprint - may result in a new planning application being put forward for the market's development, which indicates existing plans are to be ditched.
Mr Eastwood believes that is the wrong approach and raised the issue of the market as "an urgent matter" at Thursday night's meeting of Dewsbury Town Board where he expressed his disappointment at plans to review the project.
The massive market revamp was unveiled last summer.
Council chiefs announced that they wanted to improve Dewsbury's market offer by cutting the number of stalls from 400 to approximately 200, emphasising food and drink and introducing a food court.
All of the open market stalls on Cloth Hall Street will be cleared and new stalls and layout created.
That would mean relocating - or "decanting" - traders "on street" within the town centre using either vacant shops or decorated metal shipping containers. Moving stallholders was estimated to cost £2.3m. Buying 53 steel shipping containers cost the council £800,000.
Mark Eastwood MP said:
"By reviewing the plans we will end up going from a Rolls Royce to a Robin Reliant. Instead, the council should look at the options and seek savings elsewhere to make up the shortfall.
The flagship projects - the market, the arcade, the town park - need to be protected and to come out of this process as close as possible to what we have been promoting.
I want to continue to work with the council on this and to make the market a success. I appreciate budgets have changed due to circumstances beyond our control.
To the council's credit they took on board my comments and are going to look into potential savings.
Before we go back to the drawing board we should take another look. Money from the government's Towns Fund has already been allocated.
I think it's possible to regenerate the town. We just need the wherewithal to be able to do that."
