Traders 'let down' as market future unclear
| Published date | 29 June 2022 |
| Publication title | Huddersfield Daily Examiner |
Yet Labour-led Kirklees Council, which has committed itself to the £250m blueprint project, has sought to reassure shoppers that the move by some traders to quit Queensgate Market "doesn't mean the end of an indoor market offer in Huddersfield". Cabinet will vote next week on whether to accept traders' requests for compensation.
News that some traders are shutting up shop has prompted a swift response from opposition groups. Leader of the Lib Dems, Clr John Lawson (Cleckheaton) said the decision-making Cabinet "owes the public an explanation: where has their market gone?"
He added: "The Cabinet report makes for troubling reading. The community of businesses at Queensgate Market have clearly been let down. For half of them to have agreed to take compensation and cease trading can be seen as nothing other than a failure at this vital, enabling, step of the Cultural
Heart development."
Green group leader Clr Andrew Cooper, whose Newsome ward includes the town centre, sought "a robust action plan" showing what the council is doing to back and promote a "distinctive" local offer and said "a key question" was how more locally-managed businesses could be generated to compensate for the ones leaving.
Those sentiments were echoed by Clr Bernard McGuin (Con, Almondbury) who called traders' decision to quit "a sad day" and expressed fears that Dewsbury Market "could go the same way".
He said: "Do the officers and Kirklees' Cabinet not realise that a thriving trading heart needs to be at the centre of Huddersfield to go alongside their so-called cultural heart?
"The independent small businesses look to have voted with their feet. That's a definite show of no confidence in the council, [who] will have a free hand now to screw up the town centre."
The council wants to move stallholders across town to a combined market at Brook Street, and to create a temporary market offer in vacant shops and shipping containers whilst the new site is made ready.
Traders in the Queensgate site are to be moved out or "decanted" by February 2023 as the building is to be transformed into a food hall as part of the £210m "cultural heart", which is the core of the overall blueprint. But of the 37 leaseholders remaining in the market 17 are planning...
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