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Retail Development Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Cotter for introducing this extremely important Bill and giving us the opportunity to take part in this debate. I support the Bill because I believe it is very important that small retailers and shopkeepers are given a fair chance to flourish. At present, most of them struggle to survive. In our rural market towns and among the vast sprawl of suburbia surrounding the larger cities, local shops are not just a convenience for local people but an important part of the community’s social life. Yet the corner shop, the newsagent, the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the chemist and the haberdasher are all under serious threat. As my noble friend has already said, about 2,000 of them go out of business every year. In most cases, the reason is that they cannot compete with the supermarket or the powerful chain store that has opened up in the neighbourhood. We all tend to be a little ambivalent towards supermarkets. A recent poll showed that 70 per cent of us dislike them and yet nearly all of us use them. Why? Because on the whole the food is cheaper there and, like cars, they are extraordinarily convenient. All our shopping can be completed in 20 minutes instead of two hours going up and down the high street, doing what Margaret Thatcher used to call ““shopping around””, and there is also the relief of not having to worry about parking. As supermarkets provide 80 per cent of our food at very reasonable prices—that percentage is still rising—it is not surprising that so many small food retailers find it almost impossible to compete. But, why, we must ask ourselves, should we care if these small shopkeepers go out of business? Perhaps we should face the inevitable and move with the times. It is not because we mind, necessarily, about any individual shopkeeper going under, but because the small retail shop, by its very existence, provides an essential service to the local community. It is the retail outlet for dozens of other small local businesses: farmers, market gardeners, beekeepers, local potters and other craftsmen, even electricians, plumbers and signwriters, who rely to a large extent on the local shops for their livelihood. Local shops are the most important links in the chain that enables a local community to survive and thrive. If a local shop dies, the livelihood of so many small local suppliers will die with it. By contrast, supermarkets and chain stores have their own suppliers that can be hundreds of miles away and their produce arrives in vast lorries that can barely negotiate the narrow streets of some of our market towns. Also, in many cases supermarkets do not even employ local people to work in their stores. Perhaps the most important contribution that small local shops make is that they enrich the quality of life in the community that they inhabit. Local shops are personal and more human places. People know each other, people chat there and they keep each other aware of the well-being of members of the community. Okay, they gossip, but they also get to know that Mrs Jones, or whoever, is unwell, and make certain that someone goes around to see that she is all right. Small shops are an integral part of small communities. Supermarkets are not. In fact, there is nothing more irritating than the checkout girl chatting to her friend and holding you up in the queue. However, the Bill as I see it is not anti-supermarket. It is trying to ensure that supermarkets do not do serious damage to local traders in future and that their empire-building is more rigorously controlled. In the centre of towns, they can be a boon to small businesses. They can provide free parking to locals who will shop there, but also visit other shops in the high street. Sometimes, when fruit and vegetables come into season, for example, the local greengrocer can produce fresher fruit and vegetables at a cheaper price than the supermarket, whose produce is still coming from Spain or somewhere. However, those supermarkets situated out of town inevitably drain the lifeblood of local shopkeepers in smaller towns within 20 miles of them. The local shops in nearby towns tend to lose business and close down. Their premises in the high street are taken up by the chain stores and a once-pretty market town begins to lose its character. Its high street begins to resemble that of hundreds of other towns: the same chain stores, the same coffee houses, the same fast-food eating places and the same brand names on the shop fronts. So many of our once-distinctive country towns have already been transformed into these clone towns, not unlike those in the United States. We must hurry to ensure that they do not all go that way. Worst of all are the great out-of-town shopping centres, which not only are made up of supermarkets and chain stores but also provide entertainment and sporting facilities. There is one monster outside Glasgow on the M8, called Braehead. It is close to my idea of hell, yet people flock to it from miles around and I can only conclude that it is a popular success. Three or four specially scheduled coach-loads of shoppers leave for Braehead every day from my home town of Largs, nearly 30 miles away. Parts of the city of Paisley, an old cathedral town lying only four miles away—already depressed after the demise of its once-famous cloth-manufacturing industries—are now beginning to look like a ghost town. Do not, for goodness’ sake, take the M8 past Braehead between 4.30 and 6 pm, because the volume of traffic leaving Braehead at that time causes ghastly congestion and, usually, a 10 to 20-minute tailback on the motorway. The trouble with supermarkets is that they do not care about the damage they do to local communities and will actively try to put a successful local trader out of business. Of course, their main competitors are their rival supermarkets, but this healthy competition hardly benefits the small shopkeeper. The trouble is that, despite internal competition with each other, they have all become too powerful. In several cases, when local authorities stand up to them and refuse planning permission, they take the local authority to appeal and, as in the cases of Ruthin in north Wales, Talbot Green in south Wales and Huntly in Scotland, Asda and Tesco won their appeals and the supermarkets went ahead against the wishes of the council and the local community. The Federation of Small Businesses—which, incidentally, supports the Bill—is now talking about ““Tescopolies”” and ““Tesco towns””, in which one supermarket company has double the market of its nearest rival. We all have reservations about establishing yet another regulatory body and all the bureaucracy that goes with it. However, if we want at least some of our small shopkeepers to survive against this ruthless competition, we need a regulatory body with teeth and enough power to stand up to these powerful supermarket chains: in this case, the proposed Office for Retail Planning. This will not mean that there will be no more supermarkets, although I hope that there will be a ban on more large supermarkets outside towns. Like David Cameron until he lost his nerve, I think that existing out-of-town supermarkets should be made to make their customers pay a parking fee. We need the Office for Retail Planning to make certain that future supermarkets are sited inside towns and never in places where they are likely to do irreparable damage to small, local communities.