THE first shots have been fired in the latest round of efforts by two companies to build supermarkets in the Suffolk market town of Hadleigh.But representatives for both QD/Buyright and Tesco Stores Ltd told a meeting of Hadleigh Town Council that they hoped to win their arguments by discussion and dialogue with local residents.

THE first shots have been fired in the latest round of efforts by two companies to build supermarkets in the Suffolk market town of Hadleigh.

But representatives for both QD/Buyright and Tesco Stores Ltd told a meeting of Hadleigh Town Council that they hoped to win their arguments by discussion and dialogue with local residents.

Michael Carpenter, of Norwich-based Carpenter Planning Consultants, representing QD/Buyright, said: "We are not here to force anything on the town. If there's no support for this proposal Buyright will simply withdraw and carry on doing what they do with their present site."

Mr Carpenter acknowledged the findings of a public inquiry in 2001 that the Buyright site in Calais Street was further away from the town centre.

But, he said, the town had changed with the building of a new estate just beyond the Buyright store on Aldham Mill Hill, and he showed the meeting a new layout for the site that would focus the store entrance on a newly-built pedestrian and cycle way leading to the town centre, not on the site's car park.

For Tesco, Martin Robeson, of London-based planning consultants Littman Robeson, said he believed they could meet the objections on aesthetic, heritage and traffic access, that had caused the Secretary of State for the Environment to turn down the company's appeal against a refusal of planning permission for a store on the Brett Works industrial estate behind Hadleigh High Street.

Tesco has already submitted documents to Babergh asking for a food store on the Brett Works site to be incuded in the revised local plan.