Maybe because the plans were all ready to put forward and now too many folk are getting their knickers in a twist over something that isn't happening?
I think people seriously fail to consider this point.
It is so easy to question this on a football forum, and say oh if the club consulted the fans, why did they not change it before submitting. Like it is just this simple little thing to tweak.
Here is some perspective.
This application involves 92 documents, ranging from one page to 282 pages. The application fee alone tonthe council is £123,000. It involves over 20 professional consultancy teams of various disciplines. Easily over 10m in professional fees to this point for a project of this scale, based on the claimed value alone. The planners haven't even put in a target date, it is that complex, I wouldn't be surprised if it is not determined as far as 6 months from now. According to the pac report, bi-weekly meetings were held with the planners between oct 22 and apr 23, just as part of the pre application dialogue with planning alone, not to mention engagement with various stakeholders and groups. And in case people don't realise this, the real bloody work starts After planning approval is secured.
The scale of a project like this is beyond comprehension, as is the timeframe to keep it moving, not to mention the money involved.
To think the club as the applicant would delay or slow all this down, with so many people involved, a vastness of detail and consideration in such an expansive submission, with so much money committed, JUST to remove some pissy little hospitality bar and a lable of some 600 seats?
Even if they fully valued and 100% took on board the feedback from the fan consultations and actually changed their mind on it, it would make absolutely zero sense to risk a 300m development fannying about changing this hospitality offering in the grand scheme of things.
It may be that they ignored the questionnaires and don't care about the atmosphere for a bit of additional profit. It is also not at all an unreasonable assumption that this was part of the development processnthat just was not worth changing. Or that they possibly don't even know the full intentions yet, but keeping it and getting approval on that basis makes sense in the long run.