Retail Needs - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
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En cours - juillet 2012
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Dernière modification - Cette semaine
Retail Needs
Has anybody got any experience in producing a Retail Needs Assessment as part of the LDF evidence base in-house? As a result of limited resources and budget it is likely that our small Policy Team will have to conduct this research itself, rather than the usual shipping out to consultants. I would appreciate it if anybody has any ideas with regard to forecasting consumer spending and business turnover and identifing consumer leakage to neighbouring Authorities. Also, is an up-to-date Retail Needs Study neccersary for all authorities, regardless of size, to demonstrate a sound evidence base? Thanks for any help.
No experience of doing this in house, the availabilty of market data would be the main problem. As a small authority with limited retailing issues we initially sought to make sure we had described (in a background document) the retail situation that had developed over time (town centre development/supermarkets etc). However we have now decided to bolster this with limited retail impact assessment - looking at market, leakage, impact of neighbouring schemes in the pipeline and potential capacity. This is being done by consultants, but not traditional retail planning consultants.
My strong advice would be to get consultants in for this one. Retail policy is complex, necessitates many assumptions, is high risk and is likely to come under heavy fire. Also to carry out a retail capacity yourself, you will need to buy in potentially expensive commercially available information which most consultants can access. If you are going to do it yourself, the first stage is to establish shopping patterns within the district by means of a household survey of your retail catchment and a zone outside it. It is best to use a market research company for this. There is a lot of merit in doing the survey in partnership with neighbouring authorities. You then need to establish your study area population and how this will change over the study period. Commercially available expenditure per head estimates can be applied to these figures to establish the total expenditure available. Expenditure per head grows in real terms over time and this also has to be factored in. Adjustments also have to be made for special forms of trading such as internet and catalogue shopping. By combining the shopping patterns established by the survey with the expenditure estimates thus derived, it is possible to construct a model of retail spending within your study area. This can be used to identify leakage. The model can also be used to estimate the turnover of centres and other significant destinations. These estimates have to be adjusted to take account of inflow - expenditure derived from outside the study area from visitors. You can apply your turnover estimates to floorspace to produce turnover p sq m estimates. For most supermarket operators there are commercially available turnover per sq m estimates against which your modelled estimates can be compared. Retail capacity can be adduced either from expenditure growth over time, from strong evidence of over or under trading or from robust assumptions on increasing market share or recapturing leakage. As you can see, it's a complex area. There are some sole practitioner consultants who work primarily for local authorities. Some other consultancies work on a regional basis, working for Councils in some areas and the industry in others.