Out of Town Supermarkets

Julian Sturdy Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh]

That case is extraordinarily well argued in the document. The ACS is obviously an interested lobbyer, but it has undertaken effective monitoring, which the Government have not done, of what happens after the event compared with what applicants say when planning permission is applied for.

When applying for such permission, supermarkets go armed with persuasive, expert consultants, planners and researchers and can offer a view of the whole retail environment that the council hearing the application cannot really judge for itself, because planning departments are, by and large, severely under-resourced. The lack of resources is due to local authority cuts, but planning departments have never been particularly well resourced and are often short of independent data, which costs money. They are also unable to face up to the costs of refusal, leading to an expensive appeal process. Planning departments across the land are hurrying to get housing figures in place, but they are not doing much work, number-crunching or thinking about the retail environments that they often strive to protect.

Ultimately, planning departments are also vulnerable to what I was going to call “bribery”, although I do not want to use that word because individual bribery is not involved. However, a supermarket wanting to get its way, whatever the effect on the town centre, will normally present its case by suggesting that, due to some attractive agreement under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, something that the council wants, such as a traffic development, can be delivered as part and parcel of a new development. On one side is the threat of an expensive appeal and on the other is the bribe that granting permission may lead to some benefit that the council may not be able to accommodate through its own resources. That is generally what the monitoring of such developments shows.

I ask the Government to undertake some of their own monitoring, because two Government policies are not sitting together well at the moment. The national planning policy framework is leading to a weakening of the “town centre first” policy, but Ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government are emphatic that that is their policy and are putting lots of energy into it, suggesting how it can be improved, engaging Mary Portas and so on.

A key element in the process is the mechanism that is supposed to be used to decide whether an out of town development should go ahead: the sequential test. Essentially, it is a question put to the supermarket or other developer that asks whether there could be a better in-town development that would have the same effect. Why should they go out of town when in town offers the same opportunity?

In the hands of developers, however, the question becomes rather trickier than it might first seem. Developers tend to say that there may be sites worth considering in the town centre, but that it is most unlikely that those sites will allow the replication of the format that they intend for out of town developments—town centre sites may be a possibility, but are not what they want. When that argument is pursued, a planning committee will often become nervous and find itself on unsteady ground.

As an illustration, I will describe the situation in Southport, about which hon. Members may or may not know. Southport’s attraction as a town that visitors come to and enjoy themselves in is probably based on two things. First, there is a leisure offer from the seaside environment and all that comes with it. Secondly—this is part of its enduring appeal—Southport has a distinctive retail environment. We have a long main street called Lord street, which is uncharacteristically stocked with shops along one side only. It is known widely in the north-west, if not further afield. Some even say that it inspired Napoleon III to construct the Champs-Elysées in Paris, which may be slightly exaggerated, but it is a distinctive retail environment none the less. In many retail environments, malls and town centres, one could be knocked unconscious and brought round in another and not notice the difference, but the distinctive smaller shop units of Lord street, with their canopies and Victorian charm, are part of what gets people to Southport in the first place.

In the downturn, the retail offer in Southport has, frankly, worsened. There is less retail and more shops are empty—13% of all shops in the town centre are now vacant. There is also less quality retail; some of the shops are not of the quality of years gone by. There are charity shops in Lord street now; they simply would not have got through the planning committee years ago. We have seen, as every town has, the withdrawal of the big chains, which have folded up and moved elsewhere, and there has been a general loss of independent shops, whether because of the economic environment, rates or high rent. We also have a series of absentee shop owners in Southport, who are not aware that the economic climate has worsened and are charging unrealistic rents.

Like every town centre, we have responded to that situation. Every town centre needs to get smarter. We need to look hard at click and collect, and we are reviewing parking. Recently, we set up a business improvement district. If possible, would the Minister take a message about that away from the debate? At the moment, the business improvement district is awaiting proper authorisation by the Minister’s colleagues in the DCLG. The council tells me it has not received a prompt response that would enable it to go ahead and develop the bid or allow the bid to go live. If the Minister would address that in passing or make inquiries about the correspondence with Sefton council on that issue, I would be grateful.

The actions I mentioned are things that we can all do and that Southport has done. What we definitely do not need in the town centre is reduced footfall. That is the prospect at the moment, however, because of a large application on the part of Sainsbury’s. If I detain Members a little longer to tell them more about the specific environment, they will understand the burden of my complaint. We have supermarkets in our town centre. We have a Morrison’s, a smaller Sainsbury’s, an Asda on the edge of the town centre, which was forced to be in that place—Asda wished to go elsewhere—a Food at M&S in the Marks and Spencer, and a big out of town Tesco.

Our problem at the moment is characteristic of the problems aired in the ACS report: Sainsbury’s wants to follow Tesco out of town. Retail studies have shown that there is unmet need, based on figures of overtrading—we can argue about those one way or the other, but let us accept them for the moment—and that we could do with another 4,000 square metres of retail food space. Sainsbury’s is proposing to build an establishment of 10,000 square metres, knocking down an existing Homebase to build a superstore.

There is a town centre plan that favours protecting the town centre, but to me it does not look robust or strong enough to prevent the demand for a very large superstore right on the edge of town. That development, in my view, would be detrimental to the life and vitality of the town centre, and ultimately to Lord street and the economy of Southport as a whole.

At this point, a planner would ask Sainsbury’s—or whichever company it might be—whether there was a site nearer to hand. This particular case illustrates perfectly my earlier point about how supermarkets react, because in fact there is: there is an old Morrison’s store vacated when Morrison’s merged with Safeway. There is a big council car park opposite it and a multi-storey car park above it, so there is no issue with parking. It has desperate owners, who want to rent it, and short-term tenants who will not stay there for long. It has been vacant for the bulk of the past 10 years, and is an attractive site for anybody who wants another supermarket in town. It is ripe for development, but presumably, in its infinite wisdom, Sainsbury’s thought that it would prefer to go outside and that it had a case for doing so.

In a case like that one, there is a vacant supermarket that the applicant will not use and a proposed out of town development that could be corrosive for the town centre. If such a case can get through a planning committee, we have what is almost a classic illustration of the techniques that, according to the ACS, are used right across the land.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a strong argument, and the case he is making about his own constituency reminds me of an issue in mine. Does he agree that we need local authorities to have detailed retail impact assessments in place, so that the impact of supermarket developments can be properly assessed, threshold levels can be defined and future sites identified? That way, local authorities would have at their disposal tools that they could use to refuse applications if appropriate and to defend appeals against what can be quite strong opposition from supermarkets, which have a lot of financial capability at their disposal.

[John Pugh]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The onus is on local town planners and councils to have a positive view of where their town is going, which aligns with what is commercially possible. I thoroughly endorse what he has said. To some extent, the problem for councils at the moment is that they are concerned—and the Minister is pleased about this—about finding forward-looking plans apropos housing, but are sometimes leaving retail and the commercial community to sort themselves out. They will not do so to everybody’s satisfaction.

Going back to the situation that I am confronting, I am certain that Sainsbury’s has thought about the sequential test—it is not so stupid as to put in an application and not think about whether that test will apply. But it must be fairly confident that if the test does apply, and even if there is a site available nearby in the centre of the town with adjoining car parking, which has previously been a supermarket and is bigger than the site it currently has, the sequential test will still not be an obstacle. Supermarkets do not waste their time when putting in applications. If that is the case, the sequential test is very weak indeed.

I have no grudge against Sainsbury’s—I am a Sainsbury’s shopper myself—but on a negative note, from where I am standing, it seems happy to destroy the Lord street environment; it must know it will have a severe impact there. That ultimately means that it is happy to destroy part of the town’s visitor base to get its own way. I do not blame Sainsbury’s for wanting to get its own way. In an article on the PoliticsHome website today, I compared supermarkets to the mafia. Now, they are clearly not as bad as the mafia—nobody gets killed—but the analogy works in a way, because they do the same sort of things. They make a promise, sometimes, of a development that the council will like alongside a development that the council is less happy about. They have the threat of the appeal. They do all sorts of community-minded things, such as having charity collections and so on. They carve up territory between themselves, bully their suppliers and have huge and deep-rooted political connections.

Supermarkets are pretty good at getting their own way and are pretty single-minded, but the outcomes they want are connected purely to their bottom lines. Now, I am not judging that; I do not expect commercial organisations to be automatically or naturally philanthropic. They do some good things, such as having recycling centres, making good environmental noises and all that sort of stuff. However, the one thing they will not do if they do not have to is care about town centres. I am not judging that—it is the way they are—but I think it is the Government’s job to manage that issue. We cannot have thriving town centres and gung-ho out of town developments. Even if the public think that is the optimum outcome, it is not possible.