Comment: High street retailers are feeling the property pinch

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Most people won’t be surprised to hear that the Government’s high street rescue plan seems to have fallen rather flat.

New research has shown that recent efforts to revive town centres by forcing planners to favour high streets over out-of-town retail sites has failed to halt the rush out of town.

The ‘town centre first’ approach was a core tenet of the government’s national planning policy framework (NPPF) last spring.

However the Association of Convenience Stores has just revealed that 76% of new retail floor space given planning permission since then was outside town centres.

In fact, of the 43 large applications granted planning approval, just five were in town centres, seven were on the edge of towns and the remaining 31 were out of town.

The report also claimed that impact tests are not being applied effectively.

Development plans are either out-of-date or lack sufficient details to give a clear indication of what the decision indicated by the plan should be, and supposedly ‘evidence-based’ retail assessments are nothing more than advocacy documents promoting the case of the developers.

Could all of these factors be adding to UK retailers’ woes? Almost certainly. The Association of Convenience Stores report comes hot on the heels of new figures which show that high streets suffered the worst drop in footfall in October, down 3.6% year-on-year, compared with shopping centres (2.9%) and out-of-town retail parks (1.2%).

The economics of the planning and property market is surely exacerbating this problem even further.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is much easier to obtain planning consent for an out-of-town brownfield site than it is to get permission for reconfiguring an existing high street location. In fact, the Federation of Small Businesses recently claimed that planners are approving the very developments that are sucking the life out of town centres.

At the same time, some out-of-town landlords seem to be more than happy to contribute to new store fit-outs and building costs and to offer eye-catching incentives that can be difficult to refuse.

As a result, high street locations such as Horfield, a suburb of Bristol, and Margate, which was chosen as a pilot town for Mary Portas’s improvements, have been left behind by new shopping developments.

Of course, planning isn’t the only issue that these retailers need to address.

Many high street stores are still struggling to adapt their business models to cater for consumers’ changing buying habits. Legacy planning restrictions, the increased popularity of online shopping and town centre congestion continue to cause headaches for these businesses as well.

Taken in isolation, problems like these aren’t insurmountable – but an abundance of bureaucracy in the planning process certainly isn’t making life any easier for today’s high street retailers.