Urban Regeneration, Social Inclusion and Large ...

Urban Studies, Vol. 39, No. 11, 2101– 2114, 2002

Urban Regeneration, Social Inclusion and Large Store Development: The Seacroft Development in Context Neil Wrigley, Cliff Guy and Michelle Lowe [Paper received in nal form, April 2002]

Summary. Of central importance to the policy debate which emerged during the late 1990s in the UK on the topic of ‘food deserts’ were the causes of the perceived worsening access to food retail provision in certain poor neighbourhoods of British cities. The 1980s/early 1990s era of intense food superstore development on edge-of-city sites was seen as having unevenly stripped food retailing out of parts of those cities, or having repositioned that provision downwards in range and quality terms. By the late 1990s, however, tightened land-use planning regulation had begun signi cantly to impact the development programmes of the major food retailers and those retailers increasingly came to adopt an urban regeneration agenda to drive forwards the new store development vital to their corporate growth. Simultaneously, issues of social exclusion rose to prominence on the political agenda and ‘tackling social exclusion’ began to be promoted as a possible new criterion for retail planning policy in the UK. In this paper, we explore this nexus of interest in urban regeneration and social inclusion. Using the example of a major retail development in the deprived area of Seacroft, Leeds, we outline the characteristics of the increasingly important regeneration partnerships involving retailers, local authorities, government agencies and community groups. We ask to what extent such partnerships can be dismissed merely as ‘clever devices to get stores built and passed by planners’ and discuss the implications for retail planning policy of attempts to address both the social exclusion and public health agendas of deprived and poorly served areas of British cities.

Introduction Of central importance to the policy debate which emerged during the late 1990s in the UK on the topic of ‘food deserts’ were the causes of the perceived worsening access to food retail provision in certain poor neighbourhoods of British cities. The 1980s/early 1990s era of intense food superstore development on edge-of-city sites was seen as having unevenly stripped food retailing out of

parts of those cities, or having repositioned that provision downwards in range and quality terms relative to the food choice offerings of the superstores (Thomas and Bromley, 1993; Guy, 1996; Wrigley, 1998a). Indeed, a simple (arguably, oversimple) link was drawn in the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health and other related reports of the late 1990s between

Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe are in the Department of Geography, University of Southampton , Southampton , SO17 1BJ, UK. Fax: 023 8059 3295. E-mail: [email protected] k and [email protected] . Cliff Guy is in the Department of City and Regional Planning , University of Wales Cardiff, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff , CF10 3WA, UK. Fax: 029 2087 4845. E-mail: [email protected] . 0042-098 0 Print/1360-063 X On-line/02/112101-14 Ó 2002 The Editors of Urban Studies Downloaded from usj.sagepub.com at University of Southampton on February 12, 2016 DOI: 10.1080/004209802200001138 0

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the increasing tendency to out of town supermarkets … [and] the creation of ‘food deserts’ where cheap and varied food is only accessible to those who have private transport or are able to pay the costs of public transport if this is available (Acheson, 1998, p. 65). In practice, as Guy’s (1996) study of the building of a ring of edge-of-city superstores around Cardiff during this period demonstrated, the linkage between the waves of closures of smaller food stores in inner-city and suburban locations and the diversion of trade to the edge-of-city superstores was rather more complex—being mediated through, and accelerating in rather subtle ways, trends which already existed. However, what was undeniable was that the food choice bene ts of the expanded, often innovatory, offerings of the superstores accrued, in practice, during the 1980s and early 1990s to the mobile relatively more af uent majority, leaving ‘disadvantaged consumers’ effectively constrained by mobility restrictions (for example, dependence on public transport) to increasingly eroded food retail environments. In this paper, we revisit these issues in the context of a very different era—the late 1990s—when tightened land-use planning regulation (speci cally the revised Planning Policy Guidance Note 6 Town Centres and Retail Development (DoE, 1996) and the progressively strengthening ‘sequential test’) began signi cantly to impact the development programmes of the major food retailers. No longer able to rely on a strategy of growth via out-of-town (often ‘green eld’) superstore development, the leading rms in the industry were forced to reassess the potential of previously marginal locations of food retail pro t extraction in the UK (Wrigley, 1998b). Suddenly, ‘brown eld’ sites in locations which would previously have been passed over for development appeared increasingly viable and attractive possibilities. By necessity, the major food retailers previously “not renowned for their contribution to the regeneration of our inner cities” and

whose “long term commitment to the development of out-of-town stores” had been regarded by many commentators “as a major factor in the decline of Britain’s social fabric” (Butterick, 2000, p. 13) came to adopt an urban regeneration agenda in order to drive forward the new store development programmes vital to their corporate growth. In particular, urban regeneration schemes were viewed as offering the only realistic possibility, in an era of signi cantly tightened retail planning regulation, to secure sites for the development of very large stores. Such stores, of at least 75 000 square feet (7000 square metres), had become increasingly vital to retailers such as Tesco and Asda/WalMart as rapidly expanding non-food sales, targeting the trade of weaker sectors of traditional ‘high street’ retailing, became an increasingly important part of their growth strategies. Adoption of an urban regeneration agenda by the major retailers during the late 1990s, albeit by necessity, coincided—as Wrigley (2002) demonstrates in the introduction to this collection of papers—with the rise to prominence under a Labour government of issues of social exclusion in British cities on the political agenda. Indeed, by the turn of the decade, it was becoming clear in ministerial statements (Raynsford, 2000a) from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions that ‘tackling social exclusion’ was being promoted as a new criterion for retail planning policy in the UK. Our aim in this paper is to explore this new nexus of interest in urban regeneration/social inclusion by asking, in the words of the trade journal The Grocer, why Supermarkets, once considered the bad boys of retail for taking business away from town centres by opening out of town stores, now appear to be coming to the rescue of urban impoverished areas (Bedington, 2001, p. 36). Using the example of the Seacroft Tesco superstore development in Leeds, which has provided the focus for a major study of the impact of a food retail provision intervention

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URBAN REGENERATION AND LARGE STORE DEVELOPMENT

on the diets of deprived households in a ‘food desert’ (Wrigley et al., 2002), we outline the characteristics of the increasingly important regeneration partnerships involving retailers, local authorities, government agencies and community groups. We ask to what extent such partnerships can be dismissed merely as “clever devices to get stores built and passed by planners” (The Scotsman, 20 September 2000) and discuss the implications for retail planning policy of attempts to address both the social exclusion and public health agendas of deprived and poorly served areas of British cities. The Policy Background PAT 13 and Issues of Social Exclusion, Public Health and Retail Access The emergence during the late 1990s of a policy response by UK government to issues of social exclusion and health inequalities in British cities has been detailed by Wrigley (2002) in the introduction to this collection of papers. Suf ce it to say here that, beginning with the work of the Low Income Project Team (Beaumont et al., 1995) of the Nutrition Task Force (Department of Health, 1996), the complex interlinkages between increasing health inequalities, retaildevelopment-induced differential access to food retail provision, compromised diets, undernutrition and social exclusion became increasingly important policy issues in the UK. Publication of the in uential reports of the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health and the Cabinet Of ce’s Social Exclusion Unit’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal in 1998 served merely to strengthen these concerns. Poor health was identi ed as a key marker of social exclusion, with widening health inequalities between deprived neighbourhoods and elsewhere being linked to withdrawal of basic public and private services—in particular, to the erosion (sometimes the virtual collapse) of retail provision in some of these neighbourhoods. As part of the Social Exclusion Unit’s

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programme of research and policy formulation, Policy Action Team (PAT) 13 was set up, led by the Department of Health, with the remit of developing a strategy for improving access to shopping in poor urban neighbourhoods affected by retail and service disinvestment. The report of PAT 13 (Department of Health, 1999a) outlined a grim picture of these neighbourhood s in which Once vibrant local shopping centres or neighbourhood stores that provided a safe place for the local community to meet and access a range of services to meet their everyday needs have mostly disappeared. Boarded up small shops on street corners or in small neighbourhood parades, with only the locals knowing which are open for business and which are not, remain. And only people left with no other choice shop there (Department of Health, 1999a, p. 2). Although the potential role of the major retailers in reversing these trends and improving access to retail provision in deprived areas was commented upon in that report, and although an example of “extending mainstream business development into a deprived neighbourhood in need of improved shopping access” (a £20 million Asda superstore development in the deprived area of Hulme in Manchester which opened in March 1998) was highlighted (Department of Health, 1999a, p. 72), the report strongly favoured a local, small-scale-retailer-oriented solution based upon explicit involvement of the local community and its key stakeholders. The report proposed what it termed ‘local retail strategies’—in which, working with appropriate agencies, communities should be given support to develop strategies for improving access to shops and services in their neighbourhood s (Department of Health, 1999a, p. 4). To that end, it recommended that the potential of ‘local retail forums’ should be explored, and that, as part of the Urban White Paper, the government should set out what it termed a “more proactive approach to planning for community needs at the local level, including retailing”


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(Department of Health, 1999a, p. 6). By using the term ‘proactive planning’ and contrasting it with what it termed ‘reactive planning’—which it de ned as “controlling development rather than actively promoting local retail centres or improving access for local communities to a range of everyday needs” (Department of Health, 1999a, p. 5), the PAT 13 report meant the following. —Improvements in local shopping access should be a core issue for local regeneration funding. —Help should be provided to articulate the community’s vision for improving access to shopping. —Planners should be encouraged to work at neighbourhood level to identify local service needs and (with local economic development teams) to identify and market commercially viable retail sites. —Services which meet everyday needs should be grouped together in such neighbourhoods to build up local centres. —Local authorities should be more exible in permitting ‘mixed use’ of premises. —Local authorities should discourage provision of new stores exceeding 1000 square metres outside major centres. These proposals on promoting ‘local retail strategies’, together with support by PAT 13 for the concept of ‘health impact assessments’ of the effect of retail provision interventions and retail planning proposals on local communities (deriving in turn from the Acheson Report and the Department of Health’s (1999b) Reducing Inequalities in Health: An Action Report) were then incorporated into the overall National Strategy Action Plan for Neighbourhood Renewal published in January 2001 (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001a, 2001b). PPG6 and Progressively Tightening Control of Out-of-centre Retail Development Running alongside policy debate and formulation in the late 1990s concerned with issues of social exclusion, health inequalities and retail provision in deprived neighbourhood s of British cities, was a policy framework

promoting a progressive tightening of retail planning regulation. These two areas of government policy, as Planning Minister Beverley Hughes noted in a speech concerning food retailing in deprived areas, were clearly intimately interconnected. Our planning guidance on the location of retail development plays a major role in setting the policy framework for the pattern of food retail provision (DETR, 2000a). In particular, the revised Planning Policy Guidance Note 6 Town Centres and Retail Development (DoE, 1993, 1996), together with PPG13 Transport (DoE, 1994) and the so-called ‘sequential test’ of new retail development proposals incorporated into the 1996 revision of PPG6 following a recommendation of the House of Commons Environment Committee, prioritised the viability and vitality of town centres and signi cantly increased the dif culty of obtaining planning permission for out-of-centre retail development. Partly in consequence, but not entirely (see Wrigley, 1998b, 1998c), the amount of new sales space opened by the main food retailers (net of closures) fell from an average of 402 933 square metres per annum during 1990– 92 to an average of 260 433 square metres during 1996– 98 (Competition Commission, 2000, vol. 2, p. 270). However, new retail development did not disappear—the leading food retailers, in particular, rapidly adjusted to the new realities “with the help of a more pragmatic attitude to site location and evolving store formats” (ABN-AMRO, 1997, p. 6). The average size of the new stores opened by the main food retailers fell as they developed new formats (such as Tesco’s ‘Compact’ and ‘Metro’ stores—see Wrigley, 1998c) which provided them with the increased exibility to exploit town-centre or edge-of-town-centre sites. In addition, more investment was shifted into enlarging existing stores via extensions and intensifying the usage of existing stores. The ‘sequential approach’ introduced in the 1996 revision of PPG6 essentially priori-



tised for retail development town-centre sites, followed by edge-of-centre, district and local-centre sites and, only as a last resort, out-of-centre sites in locations that were accessible by a choice of means of transport. Whenever a development was proposed for an out-of-centre site, the developer was required to show, following a High Court judgement in 1998, that there was ‘need’ for the retail space (Adlard, 2001) and that there were no suitable and available more central sites. Before about 1998, it appeared to be accepted by government that identifying suitable sites within town centres for largeformat developments was dif cult. This allowed some out-of-centre developments to continue provided that they did not appear to lead to serious trading impacts upon existing town and district centres. Huw Williams of Sainsbury’s Property Services Division, for example, noted in relation to the approval of a controversial out-of-centre superstore near Richmond-upon-Thames in 1997 that the Richmond decision indicates that there is not an embargo on out-of-town developments … if you can demonstrate that it would not harm surrounding town centre locations you can obtain planning permission (The Sunday Times, 1997, p. 2). However, changes in policy were then progressively introduced—via Ministerial speeches, clari cation statements, responses to Parliamentary Committee reports and so on (see, for example, DETR, 2000b)—rather than via statutory instruments approved by Parliament. These statements effectively tightened the application of the sequential test and introduced a stricter ‘class of goods’ test: could the goods that would be sold in a proposed out-of-centre development be sold instead from town-centre sites? As Planning Minister Nick Raynsford stated in relation to the argument that nding sites for large-format proposals in town centres was dif cult and that such formats required out-of-centre sites Most goods can be sold from town centres—wanting a large showroom or ware-

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house is not itself a suf cient justi cation (Raynsford, 2000b) By the end of the 1990s and despite efforts by the major retailers and their trade associations to shape the interpretation of PPG6 and the sequential test (Pal et al., 2001), gaining planning permission for out-of-centre stores had, as a result, become progressively more dif cult (Lowe and Reeves, 2000). Appeal decisions tended to con rm the adoption of the ‘class of goods’ interpretation of the sequential test (Ouseley, 2000; Partridge, 2001a, 2001b). Urban Regeneration and Large Store Development: The Retailers’ Agenda Given this policy agenda which began to emerge in the late 1990s, with its stress on community-based local retail strategies, the encouragement of smaller more exible retail formats and the progressive tightening of control of any form of out-of-centre retail development, how could the largesuperstore-centred urban regeneration schemes with which we began this paper have emerged? And what is their role in an era when DETR Minister Beverley Hughes could state quite unequivocally to her audience in mid 2000 that We still need to persuade some retailers that the ‘one-size- ts-all’ approach is inappropriate for many communities … we need much greater exibility and should try to meet the needs of local communities, rather than expect local communities to adjust to large formats (DETR, 2000a). The Regeneration Tradition The practice of retail developers being involved in urban regeneration schemes in the UK is, of course, not new. Indeed, many of the regional shopping centres (both ‘out-oftown’ and more recently ‘edge-of-centre’) built over the past 15 years have, in fact, been redevelopments of ‘brown eld’, often contaminated, urban sites—see, for example, Lowe (1993, 1998) on the development of


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the Merry Hill regional centre in the West Midlands. Many of the Urban Development Corporations (agencies set up in the 1980s and early 1990s to encourage private-sector investment into certain inner-city areas) found it expedient to use retail development to ‘kick start’ urban regeneration. Retail developers were prepared either to buy sites outright, or to go into partnership with the agency and inject funds into improving sites and providing infrastructure such as drainage and new roads. Furthermore, retailers, faced with a shortage of suitable sites for expansion, would normally offer far more money ‘up front’ than any other type of developer. In return for the investment, they would be able to build stores which might not in the normal way be allowed through the planning system. Interesting examples of this process occurred in the former Cardiff Bay Development Corporation area and included —The Penarth Haven development of new housing and public park facilities on and around a former waste tip ‘anchored’ by a Tesco store opened in 1994. —The Ferry Road development of a large Asda store and 11 retail warehouses on a derelict site previously used for gas and oil storage and unsuitable for housing due to its proximity to a refuse tip. This development which involved an ‘up front’ expenditure of £12 million on land reclamation and road building by the developers was subsequently sold on in the late 1990s for £34 million, allowing the substantial pro t to be shared by the Development Corporation (Barding, 1997). In addition, the retail warehouse parks of DIY, electrical goods, furniture, carpets, toys, of ce equipment, footwear and sports goods retailers which became such a ubiquitous feature of British cities in the 1990s, with a total oor space 10 times larger than the new regional shopping centres, had a development logic inextricably intertwined with ‘brown eld’ light industry/warehousing sites (Guy, 1998a, 1998b). Finally, the major food retailers, despite the prevailing image of their obsession with developing ‘green eld’

‘cathedrals on the bypass’ during the late 1980s and early 1990s, were often developing far more inner-city ‘brown eld’ sites than is often realised. Indeed, Safeway claims that 40 per cent of its new stores in the 1990s (some 250 developments) were in fact built on ‘brown eld’ sites (Peter Sitch, Safeway, quoted in Willis, 2001). It is not known to what extent retail development overall during the 1990s in the UK was associated, either deliberately or accidentally, with urban regeneration initiatives. Some indication, however, is provided in government statistics on retail development in Scotland (Scottish Executive, 2000). This shows that, in 1998, 30 new retail developments were approved by local authorities in ‘out-of-centre’ locations, compared with 21 in town centres, 20 edge-of-centre and 6 ‘out-of-town’. Of the ‘out-of-centre’, 22 of the schemes were ‘brown eld’, adding up to 136 000 square metres, of which 100 000 square metres were for comparison shopping (mainly retail warehouses). This suggests that a substantial amount of development may, indeed, have been tied into urban regeneration. Unfortunately, no such aggregate data have been made available for other parts of the UK. Redevelopment of District Centres What can be stated unequivocally, however, is that one particular type of urban regeneration-based retail development did become signi cantly more important in the late 1990s—the redevelopment of the purposebuilt district shopping centres dating from the 1960s and 1970s, many of which had degenerated into very poor physical condition. These centres, built mainly by local authorities to serve new areas of housing development, either in suburban or inner-city estates, typically included a supermarket, together with between 20 and 100 small shop units (see Thorpe et al., 1971, and Unit for Retail Planning Information, 1977, for examples). Community facilities such as medical surgeries, meeting halls or public houses were often located within or close to the



centres. They were built at a time when many residents of these areas, particularly on local authority estates, were not expected to have a car available for shopping. As a result, estimates were made of a strong local demand for retail goods and services. During the 1980s and 1990s, these estimates turned out to be overoptimistic as more and more residents obtained access to a car and were able to drive to other destinations, such as freestanding superstores, for their routine purchases. In the 1980s and 1990s, the typical district centre entered a cycle of decline. Its local market was reduced to walk-in trade from people living close by and those who could not easily reach the more attractive freestanding superstores. This latter group were increasingly the ‘disadvantaged consumers’ (Westlake, 1993). They tended to have low family incomes and could not support some of the more specialist retail uses which existed when the centres were originally established. As a result, when shops became vacant in these centres there was little interest from other retailers in such small premises, typically of 50– 200 square metres gross lettable area. The vacant premises attracted vandalism and those retailers still remaining were forced to adopt defensive procedures including steel roller shutters, which further downgraded the appearance and appeal of the centre. Many UK local authorities began to consider complete demolition of their district centres, to be replaced either with a more modest retail scheme or with new housing. In these circumstances, the offer of redevelopment by the private sector was welcome to many local authorities. It offered the potential of providing retailing for local residents at little cost to the authority—indeed, the local authority might even bene t nancially through sale of the site. In addition, the area would be made physically safer and more attractive and the retailer might also undertake to provide employment and training opportunities for local residents, particularly the long-term unemployed. This arrangement was also increasingly

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attractive to the major retailers. Given that planning regulation speci cally allowed development of new district centres, provided that a ‘need’ for such development was identi ed in local authority development plans, and given that the ‘need’ for a new store did not have to be proved if the proposed development lay within a district centre (Williams, 2000), redevelopment of district centres offered one of the few opportunities available in the post-PPG6/sequential test era of progressively tightening retail planning regulation for the development of very large store formats. Not surprisingly, Tesco, Asda/Wal-Mart and King sher (via its Big W format) became increasingly involved in this form of development. By 2000, Tesco were actively involved in eight developments of this type (and were subsequently to announce several more during 2001), whilst Asda/Wal-Mart had followed its 1998 development in Hulme, Manchester (Carley et al., 2001, pp. 58– 62) with the announcement of the development of a very large store at the heart of the east Manchester urban regeneration area, adjacent to the new Commonwealth Games sports stadium and close to the declining centre of Beswick (see Figure 1). Sainsbury had similarly been involved in a major regeneration scheme at the Castle Vale estate in Birmingham (Carley et al., 2001, pp. 32– 33), whilst King sher had announced a major Big W superstore development focused on the deprived Mount Pleasant area of Hull (Planning, 2000). Partnerships and Social Inclusion Most of these urban regeneration schemes, focused either on degraded district centres both suburban or inner-city estate in nature, or on former industrial ‘brown eld’ sites (for example, Asda/Wal-Mart’s development in Leyton, East London, on a former railway goods yard derelict for 20 years) were based around partnership schemes involving the local authority, employment and enterprise agencies, and community organisations (for further examples, see Carley et al., 2001). In particular, the new store proposals were


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Figure 1. Asda/Wal-mart superstore development at heart of east Manchester urban regeneration area. Source: adapted from Willis (2001).

linked with programmes of skills training and with recruitment favouring the local community, particularly the long-term unemployed. In this way, the major retailers built up a two-pronged argument for their (commercially vital) large store development, based essentially on the contribution they could make to tackling social exclusion in these areas. First, they emphasised the em-

ployment bene ts of the new stores, not just in terms of total numbers, but also the special contribution which a large-scale reputable employer could offer in areas of long-term unemployment and low standards of motivation and skills amongst the workforce. Secondly, and re ecting the concerns of the PAT 13 report, they emphasised the importance of providing access for the local community to



high-quality food/convenience shopping and essential services in areas where the existing retail infrastructure had virtually collapsed and in which there was essentially no viable alternative. Tesco, in particular, associated itself strongly with the urban regeneration agenda. In 2000, the company appointed a ‘Regeneration Manager’ who rapidly became a highpro le source of information on the company’s programme of urban regeneration development and partnerships in areas of social exclusion. That manager describes Tesco’s motivation for those developments as enlightened self-interest, both in terms of obtaining sites, and nding a workforce in a tight labour market where it is easy for those with skills to get better jobs than are on offer in supermarkets (Martin Venning, Tesco plc; quoted in Brauner, 2001, p. 21). To illustrate the nature of this ‘enlightened self-interest’, we consider in more detail the case of the Tesco superstore development at Seacroft in Leeds. We then return to an evaluation of whether large superstores essentially seeking to ‘piggyback’ on district centres under an urban regeneration agenda but, having many of the characteristics of the free-standing superstore, can provide solutions to the social exclusion and public health problems of such areas, and to what extent they can and/or might be accommodated within an evolving retail planning policy. The Seacroft Development A typical, albeit high-pro le, example of these large-store-focused urban regeneration developments is that undertaken by Tesco at the Seacroft district centre in east Leeds. That centre was originally developed by Leeds City Council in the 1960s to service around 40 000 people on the Seacroft/ Whinmoor estates—reputed to be one of the largest local authority housing schemes in western Europe. The centre opened in 1964 and included 62 shop units totalling 127 867

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square feet (11 880 square metres) (Thorpe et al., 1971, p. 102). Over the years, the centre declined in importance and, symptomatic of the problems experienced by such centres, was by the late 1990s largely vacant and increasingly derelict. The centre was by then plagued by anti-social behaviour and, following a study by consultants in 1995, it was decided to demolish and replace the whole centre: “Demolition was intended to address the stigma of the old centre in one go” (Carley et al., 2001, p. 56) In 1998, Leeds City Council gave Tesco planning consent to demolish the entire centre and rebuild it, to include a Tesco ‘Extra’ superstore of 97 000 square feet gross (9000 square metres), together with 10 other shop units. The new ‘Seacroft Green’ district centre totals 140 000 square feet (13,000 square metres) gross lettable area. Tesco set up the Seacroft Partnership, in association with Leeds City Council, property developers Asda St James, the employment services agency, the shop workers’ union USDAW and the East Leeds Family Learning Centre. The employment strategy included the offer of jobs at the Tesco store to 243 ‘long-term unemployed local residents’ (Regeneration and Renewal, 2000). In fact, when the store opened in November 2000, 230 jobs out of the 320 provided at the store were of this nature. In July 2001, it was reported that only 12 such employees had subsequently left, 10 of them moving into other jobs (Brauner, 2001), although local sources suggest that labour turnover might have been signi cantly higher. Tesco appears to have regarded the venture as having considerable potential and has announced a further 11 partnership schemes to be developed in the future. Martin Venning, the company’s Regeneration Manager (and, signi cantly, also its Corporate Affairs Manager with responsibility for handling media reaction to planning applications for new stores), was reported by Brauner as stating that We are being challenged to develop on


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these brown eld sites in areas of economic decay—in a booming economy, employees are harder to nd. What this has proved to us … is that the long-term unemployed, the ones everyone discards, can, with training and commitment, provide the right type of workforce (Martin Venning, Tesco plc.; quoted in Brauner, 2001, p. 21). The Seacroft store opening was a highpro le event. Tesco and its partners organised a ‘forum’ for regeneration and employment training professionals, to publicise and discuss the work of the Seacroft Partnership (Seacroft Partnership, 2000). Shortly afterwards, Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the store “and took the opportunity to underline the Labour Party’s commitment to inner-city renewal’ (Regeneration and Renewal, 2000). The ‘Appropriately Sized Store’ Debate By the beginning of the new decade, the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) was faced, therefore, by retailers who were marshalling a strong social inclusion rationale for their large-store developments and stressing their commitment to urban regeneration from both an environmental and social perspective We try to reduce the environmental impacts associated with the siting and construction of our stores. We achieve this by … building stores on sites that have been built on before and identi ed for regeneration … We recognise that we can help put life back into areas of urban deprivation and we have an unrivalled record of developing stores in such locations (Asda, 2001). We have deliberately chosen brown eld sites so that we can contribute to the regeneration of Shef eld and Southampton, while at the same time creating jobs for local people (Managing Director, Ikea; quoted in Planning, 2001). Moreover, the logic of the strong cross-

governmental commitment to tackling social exclusion that had characterised the rst Blair administration, had resulted in the emergence and promotion of social inclusion on the agenda of the DETR as a possible new criterion for retail planning policy. Indeed, as Planning Minister Nick Raynsford stated Tackling social exclusion is the new main task for retail planning policy—to provide access to shopping for all (Raynsford, 2000a). Yet, equally, the DETR and the House of Commons Environment Committee were strongly committed to the principles of PPG6. And they were clearly suspicious of/ cynical about the linkage of the new-found urban regeneration agenda of the major retailers and the opportunity that it it presented those retailers to develop large stores outside town centres—the prime target of progressively tightening regulatory control since the mid 1990s. Moreover, the DETR was faced with recommendations owing from PAT 13 which stressed community-based, small-scale retailer-oriented solutions to shopping access problems in deprived areas. In response, DETR ministerial statements began to stress that PPG6 stated that “local planning authorities should encourage appropriately sized, local supermarkets” (DoE, 1996, para. 3.19) or, as Beverley Hughes reminded her audience in mid 2000, “supermarkets that are appropriate in scale to the role of the centre and the size of the community that it serves” (DETR, 2000a). Planning Minister Nick Raynsford, in a speech dealing speci cally with district centres, elaborated this position more fully. Some [centres] … need … a local supermarket, with its size directly related to the size, role and catchment of the centre itself. Some are now experiencing the problem of large supermarkets seeking to piggyback on a local centre, arguing that they are in a town centre but in practice having all the characteristics of a freestanding superstore, relying predominantly on car-borne shoppers diverted from other



out-of-centre stores (Raynsford, 2000a, p. 5). In a similar vein, Carley et al. (2001, pp. 21– 22), in their review of retailing and neighbourhood regeneration for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, criticised such largescale developments as “attracting car-borne shoppers from further a eld … contribut[ing] to the unhealthy cycle of more car use, more pollution and so on”, although they offered no evidence to con rm that this was actually happening. However, as Huw Williams, former planning manager for Sainsbury’s and now director of the Town Planning Consultancy, stated in a recent interview with the journal Regeneration and Renewal, the concept of small retailer-based solutions to the problems of increasingly derelict district centres in areas of severe urban deprivation is arguably na¨õ ve and rather overprecious. There are notions about large supermarkets coming in and swamping existing centres. But if you go and visit the local district centre, which might be falling apart at the seams, a new store with all the bells and whistles, in qualitative terms, is exactly what is required. My criticism is that those people get a little bit precious about these district centres where really development is the only option (Huw Williams; quoted in Willis, 2001, p. 19). In the view of Williams, undoubtedly re ecting his recent corporate experience with one of the major retailers, but also an important emerging constituency of ‘proactive planning’, pro-development opinion in the UK When big retailers like Asda or Safeway say that they would like to locate in a run-down area, they shouldn’t be turned away because they don’t conform with our expectations of what shopping should be about … Isn’t the prospect of a multimillion pound investment, with the prospect of local employment and training, as good a way as any to kick-start regener-

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ation? (Huw Williams; quoted in Willis, 2001, p. 19). How Might the Debate Unfold? The Planning Green Paper, BIDs and ‘Constructive Dialogue’ The election of the second Blair government in June 2001 brought with it not only a major reorganisation and division of responsibilities of the DETR, with planning policy becoming a function of a newly formed Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR), but also a new Minister for Planning, Housing and Regeneration (Lord Falconer) charged with speeding up and improving the planning system and turning the ambitions of the government’s Urban White Paper into reality. Falconer’s brief was clearly to develop a more ‘proactive’ planning system and to articulate that system in a Green Paper on planning to be delivered by late 2001/early 2002. As he put it in an interview with the leading property-sector journal Estates Gazette in October 2001 The Green Paper has to connect with a fundamental change in what one sees as the purpose of planning. Instead of seeing planning as a series of rules that prevent development, it should be a system that promotes good development, promotes good living space, promotes urban areas … A promoter of things that are worthwhile, rather than a series of complex, hard to understand and often contradictory rules that people nd it dif cult to pick their way through (Lord Falconer; quoted in Estates Gazette, 2001, p. 51). Simultaneously, and following an initial announcement by the Prime Minister in late April 2001, the government committed itself to introducing legislation to create Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). These will be similar to the successful US examples where local businesses help pay for projects that improve their local area. This will enable local authorities and local


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businesses to enter into contracts to provide additional services or improvements funded by an agreed additional rate (speech by Prime Minister to Groundwork Conference, Croydon, 24 April 2001). Guy (2001) has recently reviewed the operation of BIDs in the US and Canada and their relationship to the ‘town improvement zones’ (TIZs) suggested by URBED (1997) as a model for revitalising the rather patchy response of business in the UK to town and city-centre renewal and management. As Guy (2001) points out, the key difference between BIDs and TIZs lies in the title—in North American BIDs, business interests dominate, and they have also been used across a much wider range of mixed-use business/of ce districts in suburban as well as city-centre locations than would be covered by TIZs focused solely on a town-centre renewal agenda. Although it is premature to state how BIDs will, in practice, be con gured and operate in the UK, they will inevitably include ‘partnership’ arrangements between retailers and local authorities and are symptomatic of a distinctly ‘proactive planning’/urbanregeneration-oriented agenda which is characterising the policy environment in the early period of the second Blair administration. The retailers, in the form of their trade association the British Retail Consortium (BRC), are reacting to the spirit of this agenda in a deliberately ‘constructive’ manner—moving away from the confrontational stance which had characterised the postPPG6 period of regulatory tightening (and the simultaneous Competition Commission investigation of the food retail industry) and towards a stress on ‘working together’ with government to develop policy. Retail-led urban regeneration initiatives promoting social inclusion objectives but in a less burdensome regulatory environment are the themes being stressed in the speeches of the Director General of the BRC (Moyes, 2001). It is clear that the BRC nds itself in sympathy with the main thrust of Lord Falconer’s brief for an improved and proactive planning system

and that it will seek to argue that urban regeneration would be boosted by an overhaul of that system. In actively supporting the BIDs initiative, it is also clear that the BRC will attempt to argue, more generally, for a new nancial regime relating to urban regeneration schemes. There are growing signs, therefore, that the early years of the 21st century may be characterised by a period of ‘constructive dialogue’ on issues of retail development and urban regeneration in British cities. There is no suggestion that the principles of PPG6 and the sequential test are to be cast aside, but urban regeneration and social inclusion concerns are increasingly taking centre stage, and retail-development-linked urban regeneration initiatives may be approached in new and more exible ways. How this is linked together in policy terms with the public health and social exclusion debates and the recommendations of PAT 13 depends very much upon what is revealed by the major research projects currently being funded by the research councils, the retail industry and government departments (see Wrigley, 2002). But it is clear that ‘health impact assessments’ of major retail provision interventions in deprived areas of British cities, as recommended by the Acheson Report and the Department of Health (1999b), have the capacity to enrich understanding about the social inclusion effects of retail-led urban regeneration schemes. And in that regard, the Seacroft development in Leeds, not only the site of a high-pro le retail regeneration/ employment and training partnership scheme, but also the site of the rst UK study of the dietary impacts of a major retail provision intervention in a severely deprived area (see Wrigley et al., 2002) is potentially of very considerable signi cance to the evolving policy agenda.

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