Soham shop reaches ‘Parliamentary Best Small Shop’ final

Extract from the Minister for Agriculture, Rt Hon Jim Paice's  Web page

http://www.jamespaicemp.com/latest-news/soham-shop-reaches-parliamentary-best-small-shop-final/

Jim has extended his congratulations to James Graven’s Budgens in Soham who reached the final of the recent Parliamentary Best Small Shop competition following his nomination.

The competition is in its second year and aims to promote the nation’s most unique small shops that go above and beyond in supporting their local community. Judges were impressed by James Graven’s community involvement and specifically the partnership they have with the local police, the nutritional and food budgeting advice they offer via the local Children’s’ Centre and their recent ‘Baby Budgens’ initiative in which they opened a mini-shop in Millbrook House supported accommodation living in Soham.

Jim said, ‘The fact that this local business reached the finals of this competition shows the great lengths to which they have gone to support our local community. All small businesses need our support at the moment and it is great to have this opportunity to highlight the great local work being done by James Graven here in Soham.’

Although the shop did not win overall they were amongst the ten finalists and fought off stiff competition from over 70 other nominated shops around the country.

All good things come to an end and this week we transfered the operation of our two Chatteris sites, Slade End and West Park Street to Petrogas. Whilst it all took some time to bring  together, the transfer has now been completed with no loss of jobs and downtime kept to an absolute minimum.

We wish our Chatteris staff and Petrogas the very best of luck for the future and of course a happy Christmas.

We are looking forward to the future at James Graven too - we have some cracking plans for the future - more on these to come!!

Last weekend we undertook a public consulation on the proposed extension to our Soham store and were delighted that the weather was so lovely that we were able to do this outside.

Brilliant local press coverage meant that we had lots of people come to speak to our planning consultants, architect and store representative - some came just to speak about the proposals and some were our regular customers.

It was great to have this opportunity to meet and speak with such a wide cross section of people - lots of brilliant community ideas and product suggestions in addition to the consultation.

The results were overwhelmingly positive too - 96% of respondents said that they supported the proposal and 95% of respondents answered yes to the question " will this investment benefit Soham".

We now have a littel thinking to do based on the community views that we heard - watch this space for further developments....

This week saw the conclusion of the set up to have messaging on our new Tokheim pumps at Littleport and we are delighted with the results. At present we have a video about the development of the site running - with sound!! Shortly, we will have specific messaging displayed too. We are really looking forward to phase 2 of the software - that way we can do some really fancy displays...watch this space!! The picture is not particularly of the video pumps - it is a great panoramic shot we had taken quite recently by our great friend Mark Fairhurst.

Earlier this year we ran a scheme whereby for each £10 spent in either of our supermarkets at Dersingham and Soham, a voucher was awarded for local schools to collect. We have now had vouchers returned and fully counted by some superstar pupils and were delighted to award cheques to the following schools. St George's School, Dersingham - £219 Dersingham Infant and Junior School - £275 The Weatheralls Primary School, Soham - £284.90 St Andrew's Primary School, Soham - £430.90 Congratulations to all the schools for collecting the vouchers.