The Planners meet the Retailers

Planners and retailers are notoriously bad at understanding each other's needs. Central to the lack of communication between the two sides — certainly as far as the location and number of large‐scale units is concerned — has been the planners' insistence on land use, seen within the context of community needs; and the retailers' insistence on the benefits that superstores and hypermarkets can bring in terms of their impact on the cost of living — in itself by no means an insignificant “community need”. Some progress was made towards removing this somewhat sterile attitude of confrontation at the end of May, when Hampshire County Council and the EDC for the Distributive Trades had the happy notion of organising a conference at Winchester for planners and retailers, to discuss two specific points: are town centres the right place for new shops, and can the small shop survive? Crowds of people turned up and much useful dialogue followed. But no firm conclusions were arrived at — and indeed there seemed to be some major disagreements between retailers themselves. Very little that emerged from the conference would be helpful in planning a national strategy for location, but it was a useful beginning in terms of improving the level of understanding between the two sides. The general consensus seemed to be that further conferences would certainly be a good idea.