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What will 2016 bring? January 30/2016
It's a new year at Slattery and with a new year comes new objectives and goals. We have spent January, planning the year ahead.
This year we have some behind the scenes projects starting, including expanding out on to our loading bay to increase storage facilities, new card merchants that will allow contactless payments and secure e-mail invoice payments. We will continue to update and add more onto our brand new website, the website has been so far well received along with our electronic gift cards, which can be used online, the shop and in the dining room.
Our biggest objective and one we have worked on for the last few years is our parking for our staff and customers.
We have the issue that as we have grown as a business, our car park has not. We are in a land lock as we are surrounded by other businesses, residents and a conservation area.
We have tried many different avenues, such as attempted purchases of land from the doctor's surgery next door, the park behind us, and the land behind the buildings across the road. These have all been unsuccessful for various reasons. We have had planning permissions for a multi storey denied.
We are lucky that the majority of our staff members live locally and commute to work on foot, those that do not; park in the surrounding area mainly on Moss lane as this is a non-residential street, leaving the car park free for our customers.
At the back end of last year, we were made aware of a notice that Moss Lane could turn to double yellow lines, we petitioned against this, and found that Bury council received numerous objections to this from both sides of the road from businesses and residents. This double yellow line proposal has now been approved and will be implmented soon.
When looking into the council and its proposals of this move to restrict more parking, we found some staggering facts, Bury council provides 452 parking spaces in Prestwich, 527 parking spaces in Radcliffe and a mere 78 in Whitefield (http://www.bury.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=11347). Whitefield has been previously called by a Bury council councillor; "the corridor from Prestwich to Bury" and we are deeply upset and disappointed that this beautiful town is being neglected.
We have recently attended a meeting with our local councillor and other frustrated local business owners who also suffer from the lack of parking and space, and we are hopeful that ideas and plans to create more spaces in Whitefield will be heard and accepted by the council.
As a business we will again be attempting the planning permission of a small multi storey on our land to create more space for our customers, we hope that it will be seen as a benefit to the local residents and also to the council itself.
We will keep you updated on our 2016 goals and appreciate your support!