In Town or Out of Town author and retired senior planning expert Michael Bach offers some thoughts on this application and how it can be used

Have things moved on since the heyday of the out-of-town retail development? The change in Government policy in 1996, recently revised in 2005, required developers to look first for town centre sites, with the aim of promoting retail development in town centres.

It’s widely believed that half of all new retail floorspace is being built within town centres, but this is not the case. The research for BCSC found that by 2005, 35% of new floorspace was being built in English town centres, although progress is slower in both Scotland (22%) and Wales (19%).

This still represents a considerable change since the low point of 1994, when only 14% of new retail floorspace was built within town centres in England. The report showed that the policy is starting to bite, but it has taken ten years, and still its effects are variable. The consensus view is that it will reach 40% in the UK by 2015.

Why do we need to understand retail development?
Interviews with investors and developers for In Town or Out of Town showed that policy consistency was valued above all. Shopping centres take a long time to plan and build: developers need to know they will not be competing with unforeseen superstores and retail parks when their town centre development is complete. For investment to continue in the next tier of smaller centres, this is even more critical.

Now the Barker report and planning white paper has put a question mark over the future of the needs test, there is a greater need than ever to understand fully what has happened over the eleven years since PPG6 was implemented, so that we can begin to foresee the future impact of any change on our town centres.

Filling the data gap
The In Town or Out of Town research made clear the variations in experience between regions, sizes of town centres and types of development. Developments currently in the planning pipeline also offered a view of the immediate future which varied considerably depending on the size of the town or city.

However, this data has never been made available in one place before. BCSC saw the opportunity to fill this data gap with this online application, allowing industry observers to interact with the information in more detail.

What can we find here if we go hunting?
So the idea of this application is to offer an intriguing mine of information, and the means to sort it, sift it and see the results simply presented at the click of a mouse.

The data on individual developments are confidential, which is why the maps can only show the locations of all town centres in the size category chosen, and the graph only provides aggregated figures for all retail developments in close proximity to these centres.

Some interesting anomalies can still be seen and we all know enough about regional shopping centres opened in the past ten years to spot some interesting peaks in completions in 1999 and 2005. Intriguingly, Bluewater, which was the major development creating such a blip in 1999, is still evident within the mass of data for ‘all town centres’, although in 2005 Metro Centre didn’t make its presence felt among the data for ‘all town centres’.

However, 77% of all new shopping centres completed in Great Britain between 1999 and 2005 were completed in town centres. The comparable figure for supermarkets was 23% – much lower if all extensions and mezzanines were included – and only 9% for retail warehouses. The delivery of ‘town centres first’ in practice relies almost entirely on new shopping developments encouraged by the consistency of government policy over the last eleven years.

Testing our own perceptions
Of course, malls on the scale of Bluewater and the Metro Centre are thought of as being ‘near’ major cities, but a purely geographical analysis finds them closest to the local centres in their immediate neighbourhood.

It might not be what one expects to find, but it’s still an interesting illustration of how shoppers willingly perceive a journey to be more acceptable the bigger the retail draw of the destination. It also shows the potential effects of mega-developments on town centres of various sizes and within a bigger hinterland than we might suppose.

Breaking down data by type of town centre also reminds us that our major cities are in fact conurbations: we might think of Newcastle-upon-Tyne as a single entity, for example, but we could also see it at a combination of subsidiary centres. For these top-tier centres, out-of-town developments will become edge-of-town for other centres, and their impacts more difficult to isolate.

The town centres data
The town centres boundaries used in this application, as in the BCSC report, are based on statistics published by the Department for Communities and Local Government (previously ODPM). The methodology for creating consistent town centre boundaries for England and Wales was developed by geographic information consultancy Geofutures, who also assisted with this research and built this application.

Since the boundary of a town centre can depend upon whom you ask, a consistent Index of Town Centre Activity was agreed for DCLG, combining retail, office and leisure variables. Part of the original purpose of the work was to have the means of measuring the success of PPG6/PPS6, which requires a definition of a town centre which can be meaningfully compared with its neighbours.

This retail location tool using the town centres statistics is a good example of how Government data should be made available to all stakeholders.

Sliding through the pipeline
All the industry experts Geofutures asked to test this tool have appreciated the slider tool: slide the bar along the horizontal line and the data for the successive sizes of town centre are immediately updated on the map and graph.

Sliding through the pipeline data shows some interesting patterns: moving upwards in size from local town centres, the amount of pipeline out-of-town development steadily decreases, with the exception of a small blip above 6km from regional town centres.

This is evidence of the phenomenon noted above: the biggest centres have benefited first from increased investor confidence in the viability of central developments following PPG6/PPS6. As we move down the urban hierarchy, the relative attraction of out-of-town investment is still driving developers, perhaps encouraged by other influences, such as greater site availability.

Click here to view a table showing the extent of new development and its location if the current pipeline is built. It is interesting to see that 59% of the pipeline is focused around local and minor/major district town centres which is welcome, but it is also evident that only 35% of new space will be in central areas. This produces new challenges and if the long-term sustainability of these smaller town centres remains politically desirable, these data make it clear how necessary the needs test remains.

The health of the high street
There are some other gems to discover here. The spatial patterns revealed (ah, of course, factory outlet developments will only be found a certain distance from the edge of town, and only around the lower order of towns… this kind of thing) are the physical manifestation of the many influences shaping retail development over the last decade and moving into the next.

Planning policy is just one of these, but the completions data for successive years made available here do point to a trend away from the retail park, albeit a slow and steady one.

This tool can’t provide data on individual towns and developments, but at a strategic level, BCSC is providing a completely new insight into the health of retail property.

No more complacency, then: 50% of new retail developments are not being built in town, at least not yet, although it continues to creep upwards. Here we have some very comprehensive data, so I hope there are no more excuses for misinterpretation, and I hope PPS6 is given more time to create stability and vibrancy in our shopping locations.