Wickford Town Centre Regeneration

Mark Francois Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

I am grateful to have been given this opportunity to raise a number of important issues that are of considerable concern to my constituents in the town of Wickford, and in particular the future of the old Co-op supermarket site in the centre of the town. I am personally grateful to the Minister for being here on a Friday afternoon to respond to the debate when no doubt he also has constituency demands on his diary, so I thank him.

Perhaps I could begin on a sombre note by paying tribute to the late Councillor David Harrison, who passed away only recently. David Harrison had represented Wickford on Basildon borough council for many years and had given decades of his life to public service in the town of Wickford, which he clearly loved. He also served very successfully as the mayor of Basildon borough. He will be much missed by people of all parties, and I pay tribute in the House to his service and offer my condolences as the town’s MP to his widow, Linda, and her wider family at this extremely difficult time.

For context, I point out to the Minister that Wickford has been through a rather challenging time in recent years, especially since the covid pandemic. We have seen a number of banks and several other retail outlets close on the high street, which has contributed to a decrease in footfall. I recently visited the Nationwide branch in Wickford to congratulate it on remaining open, and on its wider corporate commitment not to close any high street branch across the country until 2028 at the earliest. I understand that will roll on, year by year. Incidentally, I also visited the Nationwide branch in Rayleigh a little over a week ago for much the same reason and to celebrate it reopening once again on a Thursday to revert to a five-day-a-week service, so well done Nationwide.

Nevertheless, we also lost our police station in Wickford several years ago, and that has been boarded up ever since. Basildon borough council originally intended to replace it with flats, but it now has an alternative proposal to redevelop it as a community safety hub. We look forward to further details, including what the opening hours will be. To add to that, Greater Anglia, which operates the train line from Southend through Wickford into Liverpool Street, demolished a large part of Wickford station several years ago to extend the platforms to accommodate the new class 720 trains. I am pleased to report that the 720s have proved considerably more reliable than their rather elderly predecessors.

Nevertheless, it has taken Greater Anglia several years to confirm plans to rebuild the station. I personally lobbied Ministers at the Department for Transport, under the previous Conservative Government, to come up with the multimillion-pound funding necessary to rebuild the station and, in a bipartisan spirit, I am pleased to report this afternoon that Greater Anglia has recently signed a contract with Walker Construction. The rebuild of the station will now commence this summer and should be completed by the end of 2026 at the latest, and hopefully a little earlier, weather depending.

In addition to the rebuild, which I believe will be very popular with my constituents, there is further good news: McDonald’s has recently acquired the old unoccupied Prezzo restaurant in Wickford High Street and is now refurbishing it to provide a brand new McDonald’s, due to open this summer. I suspect that will also prove popular with my constituents. Crucially, that should increase footfall on the high street and will be welcomed by local traders, even if that provides competition to other restaurants in the town.

Moreover, local businesses in the town centre recently voted to form a new business improvement district in order to pool their efforts, in collaboration with the borough and town councils, to help revive economic activity in the town. As the local MP, I attended some of the preliminary meetings in this process, and I wish the newly created BID all the best for the future.

My main purpose in this debate is to talk about the economic regeneration of Wickford, but given that Labour-led Basildon borough council released its regulation 18 draft local plan a few months ago, it would be remiss of me not to take the opportunity to point out to the Minister that I am strongly opposed to the council’s proposals to try to cram 27,000 new dwellings into the borough by 2043, including some 4,200 in and around Wickford itself. The local infrastructure in the borough simply cannot accommodate mass house building on this scale.

I appreciate that we do need some new houses in the borough—young people cannot be expected to live at home with their parents forever. None the less, we simply do not have the infrastructure, particularly the road infrastructure and medical facilities, to accommodate mass concreting over the green belt on this scale. In particular, there are no firm proposals whatsoever to expand Basildon district general hospital, which is at the heart of the Basildon borough. According to the NHS’s own standard metrics, it works on the basis of 2.4 prospective additional patients per household, which would mean pro rata almost 65,000 potential patients at the hospital, which is massively oversubscribed as it is. According to the hospital trust’s management, even before so-called winter pressures kick in, the hospital is normally running a bed occupancy rate of between 98% and 99%.

The borough council’s response has been completely unconvincing, frankly. It simply palmed off all responsibility for plans to expand the hospital on to the integrated commissioning board, which itself is now in the course of a major reorganisation. Having checked personally with the leadership of the current Mid and South Essex ICB, I can report that it has never been consulted by the council on any plans to expand Basildon hospital. Indeed, when the council published a supplementary document to the local plan, specifically regarding healthcare infrastructure, even then there were no clear proposals whatsoever to expand the hospital. I believe that the plan should be found unsound on that one key point alone, so I hope the Minister will understand why I wish to get my concerns firmly on the record.

Having done that, I will now turn to an area of great concern for my Wickford constituents: the fate of the old Co-op supermarket site in the centre of the town, just behind the high street. There is a long-running and complicated saga, of which I have given the Minister at least some notice, so rather than try his patience by attempting to go through every detail, I will try to summarise the background. Several years ago, the Co-op closed its supermarket at this site. In addition, some two years ago, Aldi, which operates the other main supermarket in the town, demolished its store in order to build a larger, modernised one. The net effect was that for much of 2023 there was a perfect storm in terms of the lack of supermarket provision in Wickford, other than a small Iceland store on the high street. This meant that my constituents often had to travel some distance to do their weekly shop, a particular challenge for those who are elderly or do not have access to their own car, or both.

I am pleased to tell the Minister that I subsequently reopened the newly reconstructed and indeed enlarged Aldi supermarket in November 2023, and it now appears to be doing a brisk trade. Nevertheless, this leaves the outstanding question of what will happen to the old Co-op site, which is currently in a state of poor repair and is boarded up. Given other recent developments in Wickford, which have led to a diminution in car parking spaces across the town, the car park adjacent to the Co-op site now effectively acts as the main car park for the town itself, yet a considerable number of those places are currently unavailable because of the hoardings that surround the dilapidated Co-op site—I can see the Minister nodding, so he clearly follows my argument, for which I am grateful.

Several years ago, the Co-op site was acquired by a company called Heriot, a South African-based developer that sought to redevelop a supermarket on the site. Its first attempt was to agree an arrangement with Morrisons that would have led—eventually—to a brand-new supermarket, incorporating an underground car park and up to 137 flats above the store, some up to seven storeys high. I have to tell the Minister that I was never really convinced of the viability of those proposals, especially given the high cost of developing underground car parks post covid, and the plans were generally quite unpopular across the town, too. The plan fell through, partly I think because of some of the financial challenges that Morrisons has been experiencing as a supermarket chain, which are well documented in the press.

Heriot then entered into negotiations on an alternative scheme with Asda, which I shall refer to in more detail in a moment. For its part, Basildon borough council, understandably becoming impatient at the lack of a planning application from Heriot, threatened to issue a section 215 notice compelling Heriot to clean up the site and ultimately to demolish the old supermarket, as it was becoming a considerable eyesore—it still is. In response, and after a couple of years of preparation, Heriot finally submitted a formal planning application to Basildon borough council in February 2025, based on a revised scheme for a brand-new supermarket with no underground parking and a reduced number of flats, with three storeys of accommodation above the store as opposed to seven.

My understanding is that this planning application is extant and is due to be determined by the borough council’s planning committee, hopefully by the end of May—next month. I know that the Minister will be reluctant to comment on the merits of the planning application, not least because of his quasi-judicial position in the event of a potential appeal. I hope, however, that he will at least be prepared to acknowledge that, after a number of years with a blighted, derelict supermarket, it would certainly be to the advantage of the town if the borough council were minded to pass the application in a timely manner. In short, as he is the Minister for Local Growth, I would suggest to him that if the Government are so committed to growing business, this scheme should appeal to them.

That brings me on to the new proposal with Asda. As I am sure the Minister is aware, Asda has been through considerable financial difficulties of its own, following its sale by Walmart, and the company is now loaded with a considerable amount of debt. As a result, its former chief executive Allan Leighton, a man with a rightly strong reputation in the retail industry, has taken over as executive chairman and is attempting to turn the company around—although he is on record as saying that this might take some time.

Despite Asda’s reluctance to comment publicly on its negotiations with Heriot, I have to tell the Minister that it is, in effect, an open secret across the whole of Wickford that Asda and Heriot have been working on a new scheme, the design of which is already reflected in the planning application that I have just mentioned. Indeed, I can tell the Minister that, even when I was out canvassing in Wickford nearly a year ago at the general election, multiple constituents raised with me where the Asda scheme had got to. If it drags on much longer, there is a real risk that Asda will suffer serious reputational damage as a company that struggles to make a decision. Specifically, I understand that the proposed scheme has been deferred several times from consideration by the Asda board and indeed was meant to be discussed at an Asda board meeting last week, only to be deferred yet again. I find this extremely disappointing, because—given the background that I have outlined, which I hope the Minister can appreciate—my constituents are now thoroughly fed up with what one might call, to use a military term, the paralysis by analysis that Asda has shown over all of this.

I attended Wickford town council’s annual town meeting just last night, where this matter was a topic of considerable discussion among the 40 or so residents present. The general view of the audience was that Asda seemed completely incapable of making a decision either one way or another. As someone who was there said, I can say that it was not exactly Asda’s finest hour. For my own part as the local MP, I must confess that I have found Asda an extremely difficult company to deal with as it is generally very uncommunicative. I understand that one of Mr Leighton’s inherited challenges is poor industrial relations between Asda’s management and the staff in its stores; if it communicates with its staff in the way that it communicates with MPs, I am not surprised.

For the record, Asda already has a successful store in my constituency in Rayleigh, which is often very busy, especially at the weekends, and, prior to the 2010 boundary changes, when South Woodham Ferrers was part of my constituency, it also had a very successful store there. I am not against Asda as a company per se, but the way in which it has treated both me as a Member of Parliament and, far more importantly, my constituents leaves a very great deal to be desired.

As the Minister can probably tell, I am now completely exasperated by the total inability of Asda to make a decision either one way or another. Accordingly, yesterday I wrote to Allan Leighton, the executive chairman, and have asked for a personal meeting with him in order to try and explain to him some of the background that I have sought to lay out in this Adjournment debate, and then to try to elicit a final decision from him and his company either one way or another. We cannot go on with this endless prevarication by one of the nation’s largest supermarket groups. In truth, I suspect that Mr Leighton had never even heard of Wickford before yesterday; well, he has now.

To summarise, I am pleased that Greater Anglia has finally let the contract to rebuild Wickford station, which will commence this summer and conclude by the end of next year, and that McDonald’s is now converting the old Prezzo restaurant to open this summer, which I am sure will materially help to increase footfall on the high street. But we still have the major outstanding issue of what will happen to the old Co-op supermarket site. I very much hope that Labour-led Basildon borough council will agree to pass Heriot’s planning application—ideally next month—not least as Basildon council’s deputy leader, Councillor Adele Brown, told the town council annual meeting last night, while I was there, that it is now intending to support the application. That would represent a major multimillion-pound investment into Wickford and the borough.

Finally, given that it is an open secret across the whole of Wickford that Asda has been talking to the developer for over a year now, the time really has come for Asda to make its mind up either one way or another. I very much hope it will, which is why I have asked to meet personally with its executive chairman, Allan Leighton, to try to obtain formal confirmation of this. The time for hesitation has passed; I hope Asda will proceed and that my constituents can have a supermarket in Wickford that is fit for the 21st century.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

I totally agree—one thing that I wrote down as the right hon. Gentleman was speaking was that I would not want to be Asda in this case. Asda does excellent work in Nottingham, but if it thinks that the right hon. Gentleman will go away quietly or be distracted by other things, it is very mistaken. He has a long career of showing that he will persist until eventually he gets what his constituents need, but—exactly as my hon. Friend says—that requires us to be in the room to have those conversations. I hope that Asda leans into that, because that will be very important indeed.

The conversation about town centres is one that we are having across the country. As a Government, we want to see growth in every corner of the UK—that is at the heart of our plan for change. We want that economic growth to raise living standards, and we want to support places to deliver the changes they need. That is an important message from this Dispatch Box, because we believe we have a really important role to play in the improvement of town centres, but equally profoundly, we have a responsibility to get the tools and resources out from this place into those communities. As much as I want to match the right hon. Gentleman’s energy and will seek to work with him in any way I can, I believe that those 40 people who came to the town council meeting last night are the experts. They ought to be given the tools and resources to make sure they can do the job, and that is very much my role as Minister, as well as doing what we can alongside that.

That is a pretty clear theme that runs through our devolution agenda. We are delivering the biggest ever transfer of power from this place to the regions. We have set out in the “English Devolution” White Paper how we think mayors can drive growth in their areas, equipped with integrated funding settlements and a range of new powers across planning, housing, transport and skills, all of which have been a part of this debate. Of course, Greater Essex is one of the six areas that were announced by the Deputy Prime Minister on 5 February as members of the devolution priority programme, so this is something that is very much coming to Essex.

It is important that those powers and responsibilities exist at that level—that will lead to Greater Essex being part of the Council of the Nations and Regions, as well—but it is important that power is held locally, too. I was really pleased to hear what the right hon. Gentleman said about the establishment of the business improvement district; I am also the Minister for BIDs, and I am passionate about the impact they can have. If there is a useful moment for me to meet and speak with that BID, I would be very keen to do so. I take every opportunity to talk to business improvement districts, because their insights about challenges and opportunities—as one would expect and hope—very much inform the work that we are trying to do.

As I have said, we want to put tools into local communities’ hands. Building on the work of the previous Government, we are very pleased to have commenced high street rental auctions in this Parliament. The right hon. Gentleman talked about long-term vacant sites and the harm that individual vacant sites can do. We all have them in our own communities—they really bring down the place. The reality is that vacancy is rot for the vitality of high streets. It becomes a self-defeating cycle of further vacancy, increased crime and antisocial behaviour, a loss of identity, a loss of hope, and a loss of the belief that things can get better. Vacancy is rot, and it must be tackled.

There are good short-term measures that can be taken. I am really pleased to hear that the right hon. Gentleman’s council was willing to use section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, but high street rental auctions are a good addition to those measures, compelling owners not just to clean up sites but to use them usefully. These are new powers that enable local authorities to require landlords to rent out persistently vacant commercial units, which will help to bring business back to the high street and drive growth across the country. They give local leaders the power to auction the lease of commercial properties that have been vacant for more than a year, providing business and community groups with the right to rent and giving local people the ability to shape and improve their high streets.

All local authorities, including Basildon borough council, are able to use these powers, and some resources are available to support them in doing so. I encourage all local authorities to reach out to us, because we are working with early adopters, but we want everybody to have access to those powers. We have a lot of insight already, and we would be very keen to have that conversation with any local authority. We will build on that by introducing a community right to buy, as was set out in our manifesto. That will give communities the ability to acquire assets of community value and not have that sense of the inexorable loss of much valued institutions.

As I say, this is about the shift of power to local communities, but it is also about national Government doing their job. In particular, I would like to talk about banking hubs. The right hon. Gentleman has previously mentioned banking challenges in his community and I think it is a challenge that many right hon. and hon. Members have. I am really pleased to hear what he says about Nationwide. If I was going to be a bit cheeky, I might say that there is a value in the building society model; a certain ethos and community mindedness is clearly played out there. On top of that, we are working very closely with banks to roll out 350 banking hubs to ensure critical cash and banking services, and face-to-face support. I know that that is important in Wickford; it is also important in Nottingham and Kimberley in my community.

If and when I get the chance to meet the Wickford business improvement district, I know that it will talk about business rates. They are a significant overhead and a real challenge. Through our reform, we will create a fairer system that protects the high street and supports investment. The recently enacted Non-Domestic Rating (Multipliers and Private Schools) Act 2025 enables the introduction of permanently lower tax rates for retail, hospitality and leisure from April 2026. That is a permanent tax cut that will ensure those sectors can benefit and grow.

In addition, we know that having a really good licensing regime is very important, but it can also be a barrier. Earlier this month, the Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister announced their licensing taskforce to see what we can do to remove some of the barriers to growth in the hospitality sector and the wider night-time economy. There will be more to say on that and other issues affecting businesses and high streets in our forthcoming small business strategy.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned planning and transport, so I want to pick up on both those threads before I close. Again, it is really important that they are locally shaped. For local transport plans in particular, local authorities and local communities are the experts, and they should have the power to set and shape. We want to give them greater tools and we want to give parkers greater tools. We will shortly announce our plans for a new code of practice on parking, as set out in the Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019. I am really pleased to hear about the success of the station. For many people who visit Wickford, it will be the very first thing they see, so it should be a quality offering that shows the quality of the town.

On local plans, the right hon. Gentleman tempts me a little bit. I am conscious that there is a consultation opening in the autumn. I know that he and his constituents will make their views very clear, as they should. The key thing for us as a Government is that, yes, we know we have set a significant target of 1.5 million houses in this Parliament. We know that that has to be locally delivered. We know that that involves a planning number, but the agency within that should still be a local one. That is why local plans are so important. It is why Basildon having one is so important and why the consultation later this year will be so very important as well.

[Mr Francois]

On one level, I am loath to intervene on the hon. Gentleman, because he is being so charming and I do not want to spoil the moment. Just to place it on the record, on devolution, I do not quite see it the way that he and the Government do. None the less, he has been very helpful. We have a very active town council in Wickford and we have a very active BID. I will pass on his very kind offer to visit the BID. Perhaps he could come after—hopefully—we have celebrated the news that Asda will go ahead. Is that a fair deal?

[Alex Norris]

That seems an excellent deal and one that I will absolutely take. On devolution—if only we could go for an hour on that—I have followed a little bit what the right hon. Gentleman has said previously. I think that perhaps there might be a distinction between the Government’s plans with regard to devolution and with regard to local government reorganisation, because they are similar things but not the same thing. I would hope that the shift of power and resource to Greater Essex is a welcome thing, but I appreciate that he will make his views strongly on local government reorganisation between now and the autumn, when decisions will be made.

To conclude, the right hon. Gentleman made a very strong case and it is clear that he is going to give that leadership to his community. We want to see his community have the powers and resources to shape the place themselves, so that they can do their bit. We will do our bit, too, all with the common goal of improving Wickford town centre and town centres across the country.

Question put and agreed to.