Controlling supermarkets to preserve diversity

It’s now been three months since the bombshell was dropped that Sainsburys were opening a new store on Black Boy Hill, on the site of the old Woolworths. It’ll be opening up in the very near future, with only the blink of an eye between announcement and trading. It has also emerged that Tesco have acquired the old petrol station by the BBC, recently renewing the planning permission there for a block of flats with a shop below. Rumours abound that other supermarkets are also looking for a piece of the action locally too.

The evils or merits of supermarkets is not something that I am intending to play out here. I know that some communities are desperate to see supermarkets move into their area to allow them to buy economical produce without having to travel miles to get it. On the other hand, other communities (like Cotham) are very wary of their market dominance, supplier exploitation and unsustainable practices. The Who Feeds Bristol report, commissioned by the NHS Bristol, provides some salutary reminders about what it means to supply a city with food. What I want to develop here is a line about retail diversity and why supermarkets are a threat.

One of the points that I’ve had to make to people over and again is about how powerless the planning system is to manage our shopping centres for mutual benefit. Because the Black Boy Hill Sainsburys was a simple exchange of one shop for another, no planning permission was needed – in the eyes of the planning system, a shop is a shop is a shop, whether it’s a multinational chain or a lone trader and whether it’s a gun shop, a supermarket, an organic health food shop or a coffee shop. People expect the Council to be able to control what shops go where, but the reality is that this is generally far from the truth. I have argued previously that the Stokes Croft incidents were as much about a sense of community powerlessness as about Tesco itself – a shared outpouring of anger about disempowerment and disenfranchisement from the processes that shape a community.

At the June meeting of Full Council, I proposed a motion calling for a new ‘use class’ for supermarkets. ‘Use classes’ are the definitions of different types of operations that the planning system uses; e.g. A1 is retail, A2 is office, B1 is light industrial and so on. The way it works, in layperson’s terms, is that changes of operator within a ‘use class’ doesn’t need permission, but changes of ‘use class’ do.

By creating a new one, it would mean that supermarkets wouldn’t be considered in the same bucket as all other shops and their unique impact would be a factor in planning decisions. It wouldn’t be a ban on new supermarkets, but it would mean that there had to be a formal application for a change and a discussion where different views could be expressed.

Specifically, I want to see councils have the power to protect diversity on our high streets. Retail areas need a number of factors to ensure that they remain vibrant. They need to have mix of shops that serve the community directly on a daily basis and those ‘destination’ shops that pull people into the street for a specific purpose. They also need to have a number of different ‘offers’ to ensure that they appeal to a wide cross-section of society – not a monoculture based too heavily around a single sector in direct competition. And this is where my greatest fears about supermarkets are to be found. If you end up with one of each brand of convenience store on the same road, you firstly limit the number of shop units that are available for ‘destination’ shops and secondly run a risk of the area simply becoming a parade of identikit supermarkets vying for the same localised trade.

I have been working for a couple of years now to get protection in Bristol’s planning policy for preserving A1 use in shopping areas, especially against the encroachment of food and drink outlets which are rarely daytime ‘destinations’ and which lessen the ‘offer’. I was heartened recently to discover that I seem to have won the argument with officers and that a strong assumption for the retention of shops in shopping areas will be in the next generation of planning policy – watch this space! Sadly, however, because supermarkets are included in A1 use, this won’t have any impact on their spread within A1 shop units. The tool that the Council really needs in the toolbox is for supermarkets to be treated differently.

New ‘use classes’ are created every now and again, especially where a particular type of operation starts to cause societal problems; the most recent was the creation last year of the C4 ‘use class’ for multiple-occupancy housing.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get time to discuss my motion in June, so it has gone forwards for next week's Full Council when it should get time. The Council doesn’t have the power to create new ‘use classes’ itself. It needs the national government to do this and it only generally happens after a lengthy consultation period. But you can’t ever finish a long journey unless you start it! What I am hoping is that we can get cross-party support for the idea within Bristol, which I can then use to apply pressure on ministers.