Parliament Rejects Petition Over Lockmeadow Market Closure as a Local Matter

Concern over the future of Lockmeadow Market in Maidstone has now surfaced in two separate petitions, as traders and residents look for ways to reverse Maidstone Borough Council's decision to serve notice on the market's traders while it works out the site's long-term future.

The most recent is a petition submitted to the UK Parliament's official petitions website on 31 July, titled "Stop Maidstone Borough Council closing the Twice weekly Market". Written by an anonymous petitioner, it argues the market "has been going on for years and is part of the County town of Kent" with "loads of local traders who has stalls from food to craft and Flowers", and had gathered 21 signatures by the time Parliament rejected it on 17 August.

Parliament's petitions committee only considers matters that fall within Parliament or the UK Government's own remit, and the closure of a market run by a borough council sits outside that — petitioners in this position are told to contact their MP or local councillors instead. It's a common fate for petitions that raise genuinely local concerns on a national platform, and the rejection reflects where the decision-making power sits rather than the strength of feeling behind it.

As this site has previously reported, a separate petition from a Lockmeadow trader - who describes having worked at the market since 2017, and says "customers have turned into friends, and fellow traders are like family" - was due to be presented to the council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 10 August but couldn't be formally heard because it hadn't been lodged with the required two weeks' notice. That committee went on to hear directly from three residents and recommended that Cabinet separate the market hall building's future from the day-to-day running of the Tuesday and Saturday market, so trading could continue while a longer-term plan for the building is worked out. The trader has since formally re-lodged the petition, under the council's Notice of Petition procedure, giving notice of an intention to present it at a future meeting.

Cabinet considered the scrutiny committee's Lockmeadow Improvements recommendation at its meeting on 16 September, alongside formal notice of the re-lodged petition. Minutes of that meeting haven't been published yet, so it isn't yet confirmed whether Cabinet accepted the recommendation to decouple the market hall from day-to-day trading - we'll update this article once they are. Two petitions rejected or delayed on procedural grounds is not the same as the closure notice being reversed, but it's a sign of how much local feeling the decision has generated, and this remains a live question for traders and shoppers at Lockmeadow. Source: Maidstone Borough Council and UK Parliament Petitions