It’s right to put town centres first

There wasn’t much retail news between Christmas and New Year, but there was one important announcement, which was the Government coming out with plans to beef up PPS4, the planning guidance on out of town developments.

All the major parties are broadly agreed that they want to prioritise town centre developments ahead of new out of town schemes, and in the present climate they’re right to do so, even if that doesn’t please the supermarkets.

The dire state of many of our town centres means that it’s only right that further out of town schemes aren’t allowed to hurt them further unless there is a genuine need for them. Developing town centre sites can be more complicated than building on a green field, but if brownfield sites are available, its right for social and environmental reasons that these are used first.

Under its changes the government is scrapping the needs test, which it says had the unintended consequence of sometimes blocking an in-town supermarket because an out-of-town one existed. That’s clearly daft, but I wonder if they might have been better off just tweaking the needs test rather than coming up with the new impact test which is going to replace it.

The imapct test takes into account a whole raft of factors, not just economic ones, but issues such as impact on climate change too. It all sounds a bit woolly to me and the proposals are very short on detail. We need to be sure that it won’t just mean a raft of new bureaucracy and cost for retailers and developers who want to create jobs and prosperity, in place of a system which broadly speaking had started shifting development back into towns.