New Pharmacy Contract for Ashford
We are pleased to announce that we have been succesful in securing a new standard hours NHS pharmacy contract for our client (Delmergate Limited) at the new Repton Park development in Ashford. This was an interesting case because a similar application within the same overall development was refused at another oral hearing at the end of 2017. It is almost unheard of for their to be two oral hearings relating to similar sites in such a short time period and it shows that Primary Care Appeals were willing to consider that there was a possibility that the previous oral hearing panel had reached the wrong decision. The other interesting part of the application was that the development in question had been included in the most recent PNA covering Ashford. Some of the objectors argued that the NHS could not grant an application for “unforeseen benefits” under regulation 18 because the development was not unforeseen in the PNA. We argued that the objectors had failed to deal properly with the legal test and that proper analysis of the Regulations showed that simply mentioning a development in a PNA was not enough to prevent applications under regulation 18 from being granted.
Our client has now secured their premises and intends to open the pharmacy in the coming months.