Читать книгу Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets - Joanna Blythman, Joanna Blythman - Страница 11

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.’