Sainsbury’s Global

I was recently in a meeting with planning officers and a national housebuilder, to discuss a proposal to build a town extension. Among other things we discussed the local centre proposed on the plan, which had a footprint labelled Retail Unit. The housebuilder’s representative said ‘I’ll contact possible operators – there are only four or five of them’. Presumably she meant Tesco Express, Sainsbury’s Local, etc. I had a sudden insight; this is how globalisation happens. There may be existing independent traders in the town who would be interested in the prospect of opening up a new store. But how would a national housebuilder get to know of them? It is much easier to have the telephone numbers of a few national retailers than to engage in complicated locally-based research and negotiations. The results of this are predictable. The town extension becomes a bit more similar to everywhere else; residents’ choice is limited; and money migrates to London instead of staying in the town’s local economy.

To an extent, this is the result of a development process that sets out to build several hundred houses, a school, some commercial premises and some shops, more or less all at once, on green fields. Unlike in older parts of a town that have grown incrementally and organically, with little if any planning, there is no time for local businesses to get involved in the process, to weigh up the opportunities for investing, or even to get to know the people who are taking the decisions.

My local high street, Ladypool Road in Balsall Heath, is the exact opposite of the case described above. It has grown over about a century and a half. It is a narrow, winding street (up to the 19th Century a country lane), lined on both sides for 750 metres with very few gaps, by shops and restaurants, and now, sadly, one remaining pub. It is the centre of the Balti restaurant culture which immigrants from Kashmir imported to Birmingham (or, some say, invented). Most remarkably, with one exception (a Betfred betting shop), there are no nationally-based businesses; no Boots, no Next, no Starbucks. There are three quite big food supermarkets, all with fresh fruit and veg outside on the pavement, several smaller food shops, a number of clothes shops, off-licences, a very good watch repairer, a big hardware shop, and lots of restaurants. They are all one-offs, and all fairly locally owned.

Ladypool Road is the Localism agenda, expressed in economic terms, in built form. When the government published its report on the future of high streets by Mary Portas in 2012, I invited her to visit Ladypool Road and see a thriving high street that seems to buck the downward trend. She hasn’t been, although government ministers visit frequently, to see Localism in action. Balsall Heath is one of the government’s Frontrunner pilot studies in both neighbourhood planning and neighbourhood budgeting (unique in being both), and I am currently coordinating the making of the Neighbourhood Development Plan, for the Balsall Heath Forum. All being well, early in 2013 we shall reach the final stage, the referendum on the plan. We have to get a majority of votes in favour, in order for the plan to become statutory. But I can see at least one snag: DCLG policy is that the referendum is based on the electoral register, of those living within the NDP boundary. But many of the traders who have businesses in the neighbourhood plan area, although local, do not live within the red line. They will not have a vote on the changes we are proposing to Ladypool Road and elsewhere, that will affect their future (I hope for the better). We haven’t publicly discussed the referendum yet, so they probably don’t realise this. It’s a flaw in the neighbourhood planning regulations, and I can see it causing trouble.