Special report by Karen Evans and Jane Bywater
A Knighton businessman, whose shop has been broken into three times in the last 18 months, has been told he cannot put up window shutters because it is in a conservation area.
Lee Chapman, who owns the Spar on Broad Street, has lost thousands of pounds of stock and has had to pay for emergency repairs following the break-ins, the latest of which was last week.
He claims that without window shutters, his shop is a ‘soft target’ as the thieves smash through the windows to steal cigarettes and small bottles of spirits, because they are easy to carry and re-sell.
Now at the end of his tether, he says he cannot afford to keep losing his stock and having to pay for damage.
Mr Chapman claims the break-ins would stop immediately if he was allowed to put up window shutters.
But Powys County Council claims the shutters would be detrimental to the visual amenity, character and vitality of the conservation area and the main shopping area of Knighton.
They are also concerned that if they gave Mr Chapman permission for shutters it would set a precedent for other businesses and ruin the look of the conservation area.
Mr Chapman said: “The planners say the shutters would be an eyesore for tourists and visitors but the shop does not close until 9.30pm and we are open at 6am. How many tourists are around the town then?
“We are open seven days a week so these shutters would not be down for a long period of time, but we do get the majority of break-ins in the town because of our stock. The cigarettes are in a secure cabinet in the shop but the burglary before last they ripped that cabinet off the wall.
“There is a shop further up the road that has had external shutters for about 15 years but nobody has asked them to take them down, as far as I am aware, and they have never had a break-in to my knowledge.
“The council expects people to be able to shop locally and support local businesses and we are fortunate in Knighton that they do, but we cannot afford to keep losing this amount of stock and having to pay for this damage because the council is too narrow-minded to allow us to have shutters.
“I had the Spar in Church Stretton and as soon as we put the shutters up we did not have anther break-in. At the moment, in Knighton, we are a soft target.
“Over the last 18 months our insurance has paid for some of the lost stock but we have to prove to them that we have bought it. In the meantime we have lost out on sales because we don’t have cigarettes to sell, and our excesses on the insurance for claims for stock and damage to the shop have gone up,” Mr Chapman said.
“We have also got the cost of emergency repairs for the men who come out in the night to put temporary hoardings up, but at what cost is the stress and the hassle for my staff that have to come out in the early hours of the morning, to wait for the police and sit for hours waiting for the repairs to be made?
“It’s not fair. I feel very bad as the employer that they are having to do that and to my mind this could be stopped completely if we were allowed to put shutters on the front of the shop.”
Mr Chapman said planning officers, under delegated powers, had turned down an application for shutters in 2006 and other enquiries had been made recently but the response had not been favourable.
A spokesman for Powys County Council said they accepted that for most daylight hours the shutters would not be visible but they were concerned about the visual amenity of the box above the shopfront which would house the shutters, and the removal of the existing awning.
They also said that when the shutter was down it would present ‘a dead frontage’, that the proposal would be detrimental to the visual amenity of the building and the conservation area and the image of vitality of the retail core area, and it could lead to a dangerous precedent of ‘dead shop frontage’ in the town centre.
