The Housing and Planning Minister John Healey has announced yet another overhaul of the planning system designed to assist local decision makers boost business growth and provide new safeguards for town centres and local markets.
Planning policy currently supports town centres but the new advice replaces previous guidelines. This new advice is said to be designed to better protect local retailers and town centres from supermarket chains.
The new PPS4 creates a single town centre and economic development policy statement. It retains the important 'sequential test' which requires the most central town centre sites to be developed first for shops, leisure and offices rather than out of town sites that lure high street shoppers away. However a tougher 'impact test' is also being introduced. This replaces the current 'needs test' and should give councils better controls over big developments that put small shops and town centres at risk.
Using this ‘impact test’, supermarkets will have to show how a new store proposal will benefit a local area and development that could harm town centres will be assessed against important factors such as climate change, impact on the high street, consumer choice, consumer spending and jobs.
However, small town centre retailers are reported to be critical of the plans complaining that the lack of detail will enable supermarkets to defeat any local opposition to new developments. The policy is said to be “ambitious, contradictory and highly subjective”.
The government’s plans are separate from a recent Competition Commission proposal to introduce a ‘competition test’ that will make it more difficult for supermarkets to open shops in areas where they are already dominant. There is no ‘competition test’ within the new PPS4 and the government will formally respond to the Commission's recommendations in due course.
Whether the plans survive the general election remains to be seen. The Conservative Party’s forthcoming planning “green paper” is expected to recommend a reintroduction of the ‘needs test’.
For further information on this or any other Planning, Energy or Environmental enquiries please contact David Merson, Head of Planning and Environmental Law at dmerson@steeleslaw.co.uk or telephone 020 7421 1742.