A COMMUNITY is divided over plans to bring a supermarket to a village.
Aldi stores has submitted a planning application to Flintshire Council to build a 1,473 square metre supermarket on land to the west of Broughton Shopping Park.
There would also be a 464.5 square metre non-food retail unit built next to the supermarket and a car park for 103 vehicles.
Developers used the site proposed, next to houses on Simonstone Road and Lame Drive, during the construction of the shopping park but it has been left empty.
Rachel Corrin, from Thornhill Close, is worried a new supermarket would bring more traffic to the village, which already has a Tesco store on the Broughton Retail Park.
“I’d be mortified if this went ahead,” she said. “I’d be disgusted, it backs right onto those houses. That junction is a problem, particulary when shifts end at Airbus. In the morning the traffic there backs up at the roundabout.”
Broughton town councillor Susan Stevens, chairman of the town council’s planning committee, agreed something had to be done about traffic in the village but says some residents are in favour of Aldi’s application.
“A lot of people are in favour of healthy competition but the people who live down there want it to stay as a green barrier.
“When they made the retail park people were against it but now they’re quite happy. It’s like Aerospace, you get so used to it they become part and parcel of the village.”
Cllr Stevens added the community council wanted a new interchange to be built to prevent traffic travelling through the village.
She said: “If you put an interchange in, it would make life easier.
If Aldi goes ahead it would mean more traffic.”
But Beth Carter, who lives in the centre of the village, does not think traffic is a problem.
She said: “Airbus impacts on traffic. If Aldi brought more people to the retail park I think that would be good for business.
“There’s lots of ways into Broughton so the traffic wouldn’t bother me.”
The application will go before Flintshire’s planning committee.