There is “no knead” for one of Eden’s best known bakery businesses to move out of the area, as approval has been granted for it to expand at its present village site.
Tim Conder, managing director of Bells of Lazonby, told a meeting of Westmorland and Furness Council’s Eden area planning committee on Wednesday that the application covered several phases of a multi-year plan.
“This application enables us to continue developing our business in a lean and efficient way. The commercial reality is that it would not be feasible for a business of our size to have a two site operation, and while there would be many incentives to move, we want to stay in our home and continue supporting our people and our place in the Eden Valley as a whole,” said Mr Conder.
“This application is an extremely important step for us as it will secure the future of our business within Lazonby and the Eden Valley and provide ways for us to grow sustainably.”He told the meeting that the firm sources locally as much as possible and in the last 12 months alone its spend on payroll and with local ingredients suppliers equated to £10 million.
Founded in 1946, the company employs over 350 people and in the last 20 years, the firm has paid over £100,000 million in payroll to local employees.
It has two bakeries, its traditional bakery and a dedicated gluten and dairy free bakery which was the first of its kind in the UK.
“The business has had to adapt several times to survive over the years, from producing fresh bread daily and delivering it ourselves, having a chain of our own shops, to producing fresh sandwiches and savoury products and now producing sweet products with a longer shelf life.
“We now supply all the major UK supermarkets, the country’s leading coffee shop chains and export as far away as Australia, all from Lazonby in the Eden Valley,” said Mr Conder.
Councillors were told the application sought to address the fact Bells now produces longer life sweet products which require storage. Having more room for storage would also help reduce traffic movements overall, although the number of HGVs accessing the site could increase.
“We are also proud of our employment record, we have never employed agency staff, or used zero hour contracts.
“We have great staff retention and 75 of our people have been with us for more than 10 years, 20 for more than 30 years and there are some who have 50 years of continuous service,” said Mr Conder.
Objectors, including Peter Hookway, expressed concern that what was being proposed would change the character of their village and cause “irreversible harm”.
But John Murray (Lib Dem, Kirkby Stephen and Tebay) said as a planning committee they should be doing all they can to support a “very successful and very important local business”.
There was a unanimous vote in favour of the proposal.
