CONSULTANTS who failed to include Minehead's biggest supermarket in a study commissioned to demonstrate the need for an additional major food retail outlet had yet to reveal their reworked figures yesterday (Thursday). London-based Donaldsons, which has offices in a further seven UK cities and in Portugal, left Tesco out of the equation when they calculated the floor space of existing food stores by simply failing to add up the numbers correctly. The error, recognised as having potentially serious implications by West Somerset District Council - which paid £27,000 for the research - places a questionmark over the future of wide-ranging development plans for the key sites area stretching from Vulcan Road to the railway. But critics of the plans, who discovered the error and like the council are eagerly awaiting the revised figures, claimed this week to have unearthed a further omission. Donaldsons had already come under fire for failing to notice that Minehead had an existing garden centre - established for the last 26 years and employing 30 people. Now in addition to the Tesco debacle, members of the campaigning group DIRECT claim the study has failed to include Tarr and Foy in Minehead under the list of existing DIY stores. And it has also put the major Travis Perkins and Jewsons outlets under a trade heading, claiming they are not used by everyday DIY shoppers. DIRECT spokeswoman Jessica Griffith, who discovered the Tesco omission, said the entire study was ridiculous. "Most of the proposals for Vulcan Road displayed at the recent exhibition showed a supermarket, a DIY store and a garden centre. "But this was based on a retail study which forgot to count the main supermarket, didn't notice the garden centre, left out the main DIY store in town and chose to exclude two other major DIY suppliers." The Free Press was unable to contact anyone at the council yesterday to comment on the claims relating to the DIY element of the study. But on Tuesday, the authority's regeneration and policy team leader Trevor Shaw said it was unlikely that the results of the re-calculation and remodelling caused by the Tesco omission would be available this week. Donaldsons had initially asked for two days to complete the work, meaning the new figures should have been available late last Thursday. But by Wednesday this week, the council had still not received them. Mr Shaw said the authority would not be making them immediately available because officers intended to check them thoroughly before releasing them for public scrutiny. But the delay was criticised by Ms Griffith. "While I understand that the council is keen to avoid the same embarrassing mistakes all over again, I cannot for the life of me work out why it would take Donaldsons over a week to recalculate something which essentially involves putting the correct number into a spreadsheet and looking at the answer," she said. "In fact, if it is really causing so much trouble I could give the council the answer now - it is 2,100 square metres (the size of Tesco) less than the answer was before. "It is not a difficult sum. If the figures they eventually produce are anything other than the ones before, but including Tesco, then the whole process will be a complete nonsense and neither Donaldsons nor the council will have any credibility left." DIRECT is calling on the council to abandon its plans for the key sites, which include new civic offices and conference centre, a library, speculative offices and trade units and a retail park. "Councillors, whichever party they belong to, need to have the courage to stand up and say enough is enough," said Ms Griffith. "To go ahead with these plans will destroy Minehead. "The retail development is unjustifiable in planning or economic terms, no-one wants the library moved, and barely anyone wants the offices built on the market site."