Supermarket giant Tesco has been granted planning permission for an 24 hour online food-shopping distribution centre.

The planned development is on a 12-acre site at Milton Hill, near Abingdon, in Oxfordshire. It said a new depot would enable it to improve its service to customers in Oxfordshire and further afield.

Tesco, which already has a depot in Didcot, Oxfordshire, say the new delivery centre will mainly fulfil online shopping orders to homes within a 45-minute drive of the warehouse.

If the centre is approved it could generate 500 full-time posts, with a floor area of about 120,000 sq ft and with about 480 parking spaces – 260 for staff and 220 for delivery vans.

Tesco is thought to be the only supermarket to have increased its share of the online grocery market in the past year and is now said to account for almost half of all online food shopping in the UK.