Delay to town’s new Home Bargains

A planned new Home Bargains in a Herefordshire town will not open for over a year and a half, despite the store’s previous occupant having already closed.

The discount home retailer was granted planning permission earlier this month to change the internal and external layout of the Homebase store at Ledbury’s New Mills industrial estate, off the A417 Leadon Way.

This was followed shortly after by the closure of the Homebase, one of 52 branches shuttered by administrators Teneo Financial Advisory after the group went into administration in November.

Mandi Dyche-Porter, a former merchandiser for Home Bargains, said in a local Facebook group she had been told by the firm: “The store is scheduled to open Autumn 2026.

“We will be starting recruitment in the summer of that year.”

Home Bargains’ owner TJ Morris was asked to confirm this.

The firm’s planning application said the new store would create “up to 100” full- and part-time positions, a “significant increase” on the Homebase.

Perhaps surprisingly, there has been little concern locally about the impact of the new store.

Objecting to the planning application, town resident Ms K Young feared it “could pull footfall away from the town centre, which would have a negative impact on local businesses”.

But Ledbury Town Council did not object, and indeed was more concerned at the loss of the Homebase, “at a time when there are a number of new housing developments whose residents would benefit from this type of store”.

The town has already lost its Well Worth It homeware store, in the former Woolworths building in The Homend, while its remaining homeware shops are “serving a quite different market”, according to Declan Butler of Butler & Sweatman, also in The Homend.