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Shop News
By John Fortgang
We are still waiting to hear from the Lottery Fund in respect of our application for funding. We must of course bear in mind the possibility that we may not be successful and consider what other options there are.
To recap, we are hoping to raise about £27,000 in respect of the start-up costs, to include such items as the computerised till and software (£5,500), shopfitting, counters and refrigeration etc. (£3,500), cost of opening stock (£5,000), security equipment (£2,600), electrical work (£1,000), funds for initial losses (£5,000), air-conditioning units (£1,000) and a number of miscellaneous items.
The Lottery application is for £10,000 (the maximum that can be applied for under their fast track system which is designed to encourage speedy applications) so that even if we were successful we would still need to raise some £5,000 locally in addition to the £11,000 or so already pledged and the £1,500 received from Chiltern District Council.
We must also bear in mind that the temporary planning permission (for the proposed Portakabin) which we obtained in March of this year expires at the end of next March. The original hope was that we would have been up and running in plenty of time before then, but raising the funds has taken longer than we anticipated, as explained in previous Newsletters, and there may be insufficient time to set up the temporary shop before the permission expires.
However the good news is that the Parish Hall Committee has kindly agreed that in principle its name can be used to apply for a grant to finance the building of an extension to the hall to house a permanent shop (subject to a number of conditions). We may therefore have to consider applying now for such planning permission to build that extension before kitting out the shop, as it may well be easier to obtain grant funding for an extension to the Parish Hall (for whatever purpose) and it may also be easier to obtain funding for the shop once we have such permission, rather than merely a temporary one.
Clearly all this will need to be considered at a public meeting once the future is clearer.
For
a summary of the story so far visit: Village shop