News: Premier Inn planned for Rotherham

Whitbread, the UK's largest hotel and restaurant group, is planning a 80-bed hotel and restaurant at Templeborough in Rotherham.

The company operate market-leading businesses in budget hotels, restaurants and coffee shops and is hoping to invest £9m in a new Premier Inn hotel and 236 cover Brewer's Fayre pub / restaurant at Phoenix Riverside.

Whitbread and agents, Turley Associates, have submitted an application for a 3-storey, 3,716 sq m development on land to the north of offices on Sheffield Road, next to the Centenary Riverside wetlands.

After a slowdown in the economy, the site owner, St Paul Developments, is now seeking to develop the site for alternative uses with job creation potential and Whitbread aims to cater for the business market and visitors to nearby Magna, the UK's first science adventure centre.

The plans state that: "It is envisaged that the overall proposed development will create an estimated 60 full time equivalent (FTE) jobs. Approximately 42 jobs would be created during the construction of the proposed development.

"An estimated further 14-25 FTE jobs would also be supported through supply-related and income-related categories resulting from the development (i.e. purchases of goods and services from local suppliers to support the business and from the expenditure generated by paid employees of the proposed development)."

A sequential assessment submitted with the application, demonstrated that there are no alternative, suitable locations available for the proposed development. This includes many development sites in the town centre.

With one hotel in Rotherham, at Brecks, Whitbread aims to increase the number of Premier Inn UK rooms by 50% to at least 65,000, and add 80-100 new restaurants over the next five years.

In the year ended March 3 2011, Whitbread PLC reported a 11.5% increase in revenue to £1.6bn and underlying profit before tax of £287m, up 20.1%.

Whitbread website

Images: Whitbread / Turley Associates