Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

4 Working the system

How on earth did Britain get into a situation where independent shops are an endangered species and a handful of powerful retailers are heading for total control of the nation’s food shopping – all in three decades? If consumers had been asked to vote on whether this was a desirable set of affairs, the resounding response would have been no; yet this is precisely what has happened. How did our regulatory system let us down?

When supermarkets started appearing in Britain during the 1960s, it was not instantly obvious that they were the forerunners of retail monsters. They were sufficiently few and far between not to cause undue concern. By today’s standards they were relatively small. Small shopkeepers were fearful about losing business to the new retail giants, but most people welcomed them. For most shoppers, they were something of a novelty, a new retail experience, a welcome addition to traditional shopping outlets – butchers, fishmongers, grocers and so on – adding to the all-round grocery shopping choice. Consumers saw the new supermarkets as an ‘as well as’ not an ‘instead of’ feature of the shopping scene. Local councils often viewed them positively as a whole new pot of rateable revenue.

By the late 1980s, however, supermarkets were multiplying at a steady rate. They were becoming bigger too. The nightmare scenarios articulated by independent shopkeepers were beginning to be played out on the high street. Belatedly, the penny dropped that a supermarket land grab was under way. It became obvious that some restrictions to curb the spread of supermarkets would be needed. In 1988, the Department of the Environment issued a planning policy note (PPG6) for England containing general guidance for local authorities. This said that although the planning system should not inhibit competition between retailers – perish the thought! – it should take into account whether a new supermarket would affect the vitality and viability of a nearby town centre. But this guidance proved totally inadequate to slow down the supermarkets’ inexorable push for retail space. A proliferation of large superstores followed.

The supermarket retail revolution no longer meant the odd useful store on the edge of urban areas, but a ring of similar developments creating a supermarket bracelet around towns and cities, a bracelet elastic enough to allow the insertion of ever more links. Chain B would build a new store, bigger and better than chain A’s existing store in the area. So chain A would respond with another bigger store to claw back the business the newcomer had taken away. Chain C, meanwhile, not to be outdone, would open its store to make sure it got its slice of the retail action.

People were surprised, and even shocked, to find that these superstores were sometimes constructed on greenfield land, even playing fields, which they had always supposed would never be put under hard landscaping of any sort, naively assuming that they would be protected by local development plans. Such plans proved to be weaker and more open to interpretation than many had supposed. Local planners felt their hands were tied. Even if they had the will to say no, they lacked the regulatory ammunition.

By 1993, the decline of small traders as a critical proportion of their customers began to drift off to the shiny new superstores with limitless free parking had become sufficiently acute for the government to issue a revised version of PPG6. This stressed the need for a suitable balance between developments in town centres and out of centre. It said that the scale, type and location of the supermarket should not undermine the vitality and viability of town centres. A year later this guidance was strengthened by PPG13. This stressed the need to promote more sustainable transport choices and to reduce the need to travel, especially by car. No one disputed that supermarkets were major generators of car travel. Their existence was encouraging shoppers to get in their cars and drive, even for just a carton of milk, when there was a local shop within walking distance.

But even though local authorities now had new grounds on which to cramp the supermarkets’ style, the supermarkets’ takeover of grocery retailing continued. By 1996, PPG6 had to be strengthened again. But by this point the horse had bolted. A further flurry of supermarket developments on the edge of towns and cities was of particular concern. This time PPG6 required local authorities to give preference to applications for supermarket developments on town-or district-centre sites. Out-of-centre sites were ranked below them and would not be approved if town-centre sites were available. New out-of-centre supermarkets should only be in locations that were well served by public transport.

The situation was and still is different in other parts of the British Isles. In Wales, the regulatory framework is less supermarket-friendly: if a new out-of-centre supermarket is ‘likely to lead to the loss of general food retailing in the centre of small towns’, this is grounds for refusal. In Scotland, the notion of whether or not a supermarket is needed is not addressed in law. Northern Ireland’s planning regulations allow supermarkets on sites outside town centres, providing certain criteria are met. In Ireland, there is a cap on the amount of floor space that supermarkets can have: 3,000 square metres outside Dublin and 3,500 in the greater Dublin area. In addition, there is a presumption against supermarket developments on out-of-town sites and local authorities must safeguard local shops in their development plans.

In the twenty-first century, supermarket chains face tighter planning controls than they did in the previous one. In theory, it is currently quite hard for them to get planning permission for new stores out of town. That is why they have largely turned their attention to the inner cities where they are looking to expand into ‘brownfield’ sites. Such sites have previously been built on and are usually in an advanced state of dilapidation, and so proposed developments do not attract the same objections as a new superstore on a greenfield site would. On the other hand, because a new supermarket on a brownfield site must fit into an already developed urban area, it is subject to a number of detailed and more specific planning considerations that do not always apply to out-of-town sites: the impact on local views, congestion of small streets, noise and light pollution and so on.

On paper anyway, there are grounds for local authorities to refuse permission for a new supermarket. But more often than not, our supermarket chains succeed. Of 170 supermarket planning applications submitted in the UK in the three years to 31 March 2003, 83 (49 per cent) were approved, 33 (19 per cent) were rejected or withdrawn and 54 (32 per cent) were still pending at the time of writing. John Sweeney, leader of North Norfolk District Council, summed up the dilemma faced by local authorities. ‘They are too big and powerful for us. If we try and deny them they will appeal, and we cannot afford to fight a planning appeal and lose. If they got costs it could bankrupt us.’ Supermarkets simply don’t like to take no for an answer, and come back with one revised plan after another, until they get their way.

5 Sugar daddies

Stopping or even seeking to downsize a new supermarket development is a daunting task. No wonder really organised community opposition is rare. As one pro-supermarket commentator sanguinely put it:

At the end of the day, most planning authorities have bowed to a combination of consumer apathy – or even tacit support for the new supermarket sites – and the ability of retailers to ‘sweeten the pill’ on their arrival in a new locality … Key local aspirations that had seemed too expensive to fulfil – cleaning up derelict areas, building sports fields and social centres were favourites – gained crucial new support. Hundreds of new jobs were immediately created. The only losers were the collections of locally owned high street stores which had been fighting a losing battle for custom with prices that were perceived as too high, parking that was inadequate and service that appeared and indeed often was both slow and old-fashioned. Furthermore, it was usually months or even years after the new superstore’s arrival that the downside consequences became apparent.

Nowadays supermarket chains know that they have a better chance of securing planning consent for a new store if they parcel it up in a mixed development. The Town and Country Planning Act recognises the concept of ‘planning gain’ or elements included in a planning application to make an application more attractive to local authorities. It allows for what are known as Section 106 agreements. A council and supermarket chain can agree that certain work must be carried out before permission can be granted. For example, the supermarket might have to pay for trees to be replanted, traffic lights moved and roads relaid, or sports facilities provided. Often these take the form of sizeable cash payments from the would-be supermarket developer to the council. Using Section 106 agreements, supermarkets have the perfect sweetener to dangle before local authorities. Developers talk excitedly of ‘synergies’ with supermarkets that might make possible what previously seemed like unprofitable developments. Supermarkets, arm in arm with property developers, can act as sugar daddies to the community, even to the extent of getting permission for out-of-centre developments that would otherwise be out of the question.

In Coventry in 2000, Tesco won planning consent for one of its biggest stores in the country by agreeing to part-fund a new stadium. ‘Sometimes the value of the land is enough to push the deal,’ said a Tesco spokesperson; ‘sometimes you have to build the stadium.’

In 2003, a property consortium submitted a planning application for a stadium for Wimbledon Football Club near Bletchley and Milton Keynes. This new 30,000-seat stadium and 6,500-seat arena would be part-financed or enabled by a 100,000-square-foot Asda Wal-Mart Supercentre, the largest Asda format. The consortium’s website aimed at encouraging locals to write letters to council planners in support of the plan was headed, ‘Dreams can become a reality for Milton Keynes and Bletchley.’ The consortium’s chairman, Pete Winkleman, argued the case as follows: ‘Milton Keynes needs an international stadium. Wimbledon FC needs a home. Asda needs a store in the largest city in the UK where it doesn’t already have one. Bletchley needs a major investment scheme to kickstart its regeneration … Without the stadium, without a revitalised Bletchley, without Wimbledon FC, Milton Keynes remains incomplete. Without Asda none of it happens.’

The more desirable elements that go into the development mix the better, and housing, as well as sport, is usually a winner. In 2003, Tesco announced its plans to build 3–4,000 affordable homes nationwide. Among these were an application for a development in Streatham, South London, where it wanted to build a complex which would include a leisure centre, Tesco store and 250 homes, 40 per cent of which would be for key workers. In Romford, Essex, Sainsbury’s new superstore was part of a mixed-use development that included housing, a health club, restaurants, a bowling alley and cinemas.

Just as they were being accused of taking away business from town centres and encouraging traffic by means of such projects, supermarkets have reinvented themselves as urban regenerators with pockets deep enough to make long-cherished community goals possible. As The Grocer noted archly: ‘Regeneration projects can gain speedy approval from councils and local communities. A whole regeneration package, promising mixed use development … is likely to prove far more attractive to planners than just a plain old superstore.’ Our large supermarket chains’ enormous retail power certainly provides them with the money to make things happen. But the downside of these carrot-and-stick regeneration packages is that they are another way in which supermarkets are insinuating themselves into all aspects of our lives, embedding themselves deeper and deeper in our manmade landscape and hence our consciousness. In Kilmarnock in Scotland, for example, certain areas of the town are listed in local bus timetables according to the supermarket chain that dominates them: Wester Netherton has become Kwik Save and Scott Ellis has become Asda.

The supermarkets are happy to bask in their role as the new civic developers as long as they get their pound of retail flesh. But the price for planners and their communities is that they may have to say yes to a new store when they would otherwise prefer to say no. Where once people strolled in the park, or walked around the local duck pond, a day out in our supermarket-saturated country is beginning to mean a visit to a shopping and leisure centre of which a supermarket is an integral part. Naturally, supermarket chains are keen to promote their stores as places in which to while away leisure time. Under the headline ‘Everyone Asda have a hobby’, the freesheet Metro told the story of septuagenarian Richard Bunn who, after enjoying a bargain all-day breakfast at his local store in Weston-Super-Mare, had made his hobby visiting Asda stores. When he had travelled some 100,000 miles to visit all its stores in Britain, Asda grasped the public relations opportunity and asked Mr Bunn to open a new store in Oldbury in the West Midlands. ‘I know people think I’m batty but I love Asda and once I decided to visit every store, I became a man with a mission,’ Mr Bunn told assembled press.

If an obdurate local authority says no to a supermarket development, even if it is cloaked in a halo of urban revitalisation, supermarkets have further avenues to pursue. The original foot-in-the-door tactic was to construct smaller stores – which are more likely to get planning permission – that just happened to have ridiculously large numbers of parking places. This built in a generous margin of surplus land for future extensions. A few years later, the chain could apply to extend the original store into the car park. Little by little, the chain could realise its greater plan. Nowadays the buzz words are ‘space sweating’. Chains ‘sweat assets’ by building mezzanine floors in existing stores where they would not be allowed to extend externally. UK planning law excludes internal building work from the definition of development requiring planning permission. In 2003, Asda Wal-Mart announced its intention to build mezzanine floors in up to forty stores in what Dow Jones International News reported as ‘a way of increasing space amid strict planning laws’. After a successful mezzanine was slotted into its York store, Asda Wal-Mart set about building floors in stores in Sheffield, and Cumbernauld and Govan in Glasgow. In the Sheffield Asda, the mezzanine added 33,000 square feet to the store – almost the same sales area as the largest supermarket now permitted in Ireland. Friends of the Earth blew the whistle. ‘Asda Wal-Mart is making a mockery of planning guidance. By installing mezzanines in existing stores, the company does not even have to submit a planning application to the local authority. This leaves the local authority powerless to assess the impact on local shops or traffic levels and local communities have no say in the development,’ it pointed out. Sheffield MP Clive Betts told the House of Commons that the mezzanine expansion in his constituency had made existing traffic problems worse. ‘Traffic is considerably heavier, yet there has been no analysis or plan to deal with it, because there has been no requirement for the store to sit down with the highways authority and the planning authority to work out these problems, because there is no need for planning permission.’

Yet another approach is to include housing in proposals for extensions to existing stores. Sainsbury’s, for example, got the go-ahead to extend its Richmond store from an already substantial 55,000 square feet to 63,500 square feet largely because it would build 179 flats on top of the existing store and the extension.

Our supermarket chains are determined to get planning permission for new stores and extensions to existing ones. And despite the fact that theoretically they now operate in a tricky planning climate, it is amazing how often they get what they want. As Tesco’s finance director told the Daily Telegraph, ‘Planning approvals have not stopped. It’s just more difficult than it used to be. Out of town is very difficult to get but you are seeing brownfield sites redeveloped. Planning changes have not killed development. They have acted to redirect it.’

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