PLANNERS this week voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Costa coffee chain’s drive-thru scheme for Llanfoist which has divided public opinion.

But Monmouthshire County Council’s planning committee were of one mind that the project should go ahead.

They voted 12-1 in favour of the proposal which one critic said would now act as a ‘very effective Trojan horse’ for the similarly controversial McDonald’s application to be given the all clear on the same Westgate site.

Most of the committee felt the economic and employment considerations were important considerations in accepting the enterprise.

One opponent of the scheme, Patrick Hannay, said during the meeting at Usk on Wednesday, “Despite all the hair-splitting debates about ‘being-in-character’ by sharing materials and forms, not a single application on this site has presented accurate three dimensional visualisations of buildings in relation to each other and in their wider landscape setting, with the proposed landscape additions that will enhance it.

“To have shown this honestly to a planning committee might have given the game away. Like the current site-works, it might have shown a ‘desert’ of isolated objects dependent on encouraging car usage, another MCC policy controverted.”

He claimed the application was “another typically flawed proposal, like those before it and those yet to come on this beautiful site in the Usk Valley.”