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Retail Development Bill [HL]

My Lords, even if parliamentarians have an enthusiastic business background—as I do, mainly in the financial sector in the City—it is their job to legislate on a coherent basis to establish a balance between different factors in our economic society. For people on the Conservative Benches to say that competition is the primordial matter and nothing else matters at all is wrong. It is the same as saying that British society is just concerned with making money, as many people conceive that it is. If that view is correct, society gradually disintegrates. I hope that the new Labour Government do not subscribe to it; there are other things in society as well. There is a real crisis here. I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Cope, said at the beginning of his speech that he supports the Bill, although he was nitpicking and curmudgeonly in his subsequent remarks. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Cotter on introducing the Bill; I am quite proud of the fact that 50 per cent of the speakers in this debate are from the Liberal Democrat Benches. I entirely agree with all the wise remarks made by my noble friend Lord Glasgow, particularly his reference to the ghastly super-shed near his home town. There is a real crisis, which the Government have to face. The Competition Commission has totally failed the normative shopkeeper sector, which includes small shops, medium-sized shops and even some small supermarkets—the little local ones that have developed in towns, which have an interesting future and are much more attractive than the giants. The Government have to address this. People can easily say that the Office for Retail Planning is yet another bureaucratic addition to the panoply and that they do not want it because it will cause a lot of extra cost and so on. I am not so sure. It needs to be seriously examined as a concept. We remember the demise of rent controls and the effect that that had on hapless tenants in the old days when the market in this country became completely free. Some far more successful European economies, such as those of Germany, France and Italy—we boast in Britain that we are the primordial economy in Europe, but we take our statistics rather selectively—still retain some of those controls because they know that the reality is that the average power of the average landlord is higher than the average power of the average tenant. It is as simple as that. In Britain, under the complacent laziness and obduracy of the Competition Commission, the supermarkets have now reached 75 per cent penetration. I declare two interests: I am an officer of the All-Party Group on Retail Industry—at least, at the most recent AGM I was—and I live in France for a considerable amount of time and study the development of the retail sector there. I entirely agree with what the Federation of Small Businesses said about the situation in France. Seventy-five per cent is too much. It represents a breach of the Competition Commission’s duties. Thousands of small shops often offer cheaper prices than supermarkets, particularly after the latter stages of a supermarket being installed when, as we know, they do loss-leading. By the way, what about the deliberate sale of alcohol at very low prices? That is a scandal that the supermarkets have allowed to develop. Tesco is now trying hurriedly to restore the balance by making proposals to the Government, but why did it sell cheap alcohol at the entrance display units of its supermarkets? That is disgraceful, irresponsible conduct, just to make money, profits and turnover. These things are unacceptable in a civilised society. Of course, we believe in the healthy effects of competition between different entities of all sizes and, indeed, competition between the supermarkets has been a great benefit, to hard-pressed housewives particularly, but also to househusbands nowadays, who rush around doing the shopping quickly. But it is not all that. Small shops have an enormous amount to offer. They are social and human centres as well. That is also important. If only money, cheap prices and nothing else matter, new Labour is letting down the public. I support most of the Bill, although it needs meticulous study in Committee to make sure that the arguments are sound. The Bill is not fundamentally against supermarkets; it is against their excessive, overweening power and their ability strongly and stridently to bully local authorities and even to intimidate inspectors—the inspector appeal system is lamentable and pathetic. As an MP in Harrow, I saw the first stages of that. Appeals were hopeless because the inspector rightly based his conclusions just on legalistic, commercial and other judicial matters; they had nothing to do with the intrinsic interests of the local community. Time and again, the supermarket representatives went out with a smile on their faces after the inspector had upheld their appeal. The local authorities were completely undermined by this process. We wait to hear the Minister’s views. He is the only Labour speaker today—I notice that there are no Back-Benchers. We hope that he will not demolish the idea of an Office for Retail Planning, because we need a specific, new entity—one hopes that its overheads will be minimal and modest if it is created—to hold the balance between hard-pressed local authorities, which need increasing revenue from businesses as well as council tax payers, and the local community, which comprises a broad range of interests. Living in France and seeing retail development there, I can say how different the situation is. This country needs to learn some lessons from European countries. It is no good our saying, ““We know best. We have nothing to learn from these countries””. I say as an aside that Europe has the most successful currency in the world; we ought to join it; we should have joined it years ago, but we have not—but that is another matter. France has control mechanisms between applications from supermarkets and the legitimate interests of local shopkeepers. Napoleon was wrong when he said that only Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, because France is, too. There are thousands of shops there, as we know. The noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, looks as though he is about to rise, but I would prefer not to give way to him for reasons of time; I do not want to speak for too long. However, I give way.