Road threat t London haulage jobs
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• A South London haulier employing 400 people is threatening to close its £3m depot unless the local council completes a link allowing access to the development from the nearby main road.
A&J Bull of Mitcham claims the road link was agreed by the previous Conservative administration but was shelved by the Labour Party when it won the council in the May 1990 elections. Now Bull is considering moving its Benedict Road site to Bedford, where much of its bulk transport runs: "It would suit us geographically," says the company.
The link would allow Bull's vehicle access to the main Morden Road and enable them to travel north or south without disrupting residents in Church Road — a narrow strip of road leading in from Mitcham town centre which is unsuitable for heavy vehicles. At present, Church Road provides the only access to Bull's site.
"The chairman of the council visited our site but has not been very sympathetic," says Bull deputy managing director Stephen Mills. He claims that the firm's battles for planning permission in the borough go back more than 23 years.
"We employ a lot of people and have not been treated very fairly," adds Mills, who claims that for its first 20 years in Mitcham Bull operated from portable buildings because planning permission for site development was thwarted by threatened road schemes.
Bull paid £.2m for the Benedict Road site and has spent another £1m on development. "We have told the council that we need to get on with our business," says Mills, who has outline planning permission for several projects on the site.
Merton Council meets today (20 February) to discuss its Unitary Development Plan, which covers a number of road schemes in the borough with proposals for improved public transport. When elected the council was opposed to building new roads, but has since widened part of Church Road leading to Bull's depot from nearby Colliers Wood.
"We have met A&J Bull and heard its concerns," says a council spokeswoman. "The council is concerned with employment matters and we do not want to see a loss of employment to local residents. However, the decision is up to Bull — if the site becomes vacant it could be used by another employer."
The council is considering alternatives to the link to Morden Road, but according to Angela Rumbold, Conservative MP for Mitcham & Morden, some of these could mean knocking down houses: "The decision to abandon the link road was a disaster — it was the only route across waste land," she says.
Bull's plan for the Mitcham site includes bringing together three operations and a new office block. It has already completed a waste transfer station which treats loads of waste prior to onward transshipment in larger trucks.
It also wants a builders merchants and a ready-mixed concrete plant on the site — if the link road is completed the builders' merchants will have a frontage on to passing traffic. Bull says it cannot go ahead with the office block because that is -blighted" by another road scheme. Bull has 60 vehicles at the depot with 150 vehicle movements a day out of the waste centre: "There are no more vehicles than before we moved to the new site," says Mills.