Blears to pledge action to protect small shops

Communities and Local Government has decided to publish new retail planning guidance which will remove the existing "needs test", create a new, tougher "impact test", and protect the presence of small shops.

Communities secretary Hazel Blears was today due to spell out the Government's intentions in a keynote speech to the Royal Town Planning Institute's annual planning convention.

Blears argues that the new proposals were needed to strengthen the administration's "town centres first" planning policy and to resist the trend towards "clone towns".

She was to tell conference delegates: "Our priority is to ensure we do not see more and more stretches of the nation's high streets turned into bland 'every towns' where every high street has the same shops, the same look and the same sterile feel.

"We need more individuality, more small-scale independent shops and a new spirit of independent enterprise on our high streets."

The Secretary of State was to explain that the changes to policy advice would remove the "simplistic planning test that only judged whether there was capacity for an out of town supermarket and replace it with a more rounded impact test that assesses the risks and benefits of new businesses on existing small shops and the town centre".

Blears was also to confirm that the Government would formally respond to the Competition Commission's recent recommendations on the competition test "in due course".

Read the Communities and Local Government press release here.

Roger Milne

10 July 2008