Talking Tesco: UK Competition Commission

Why are we publishing these comments?

Tesco has been reading with interest the third party comments on the Groceries Market Investigation that the Competition Commission has been publishing on its website. Our formal submissions have addressed many of the issues raised by these comments, particularly those of some of the professional lobbying organisations. However, a number of submissions on the Competition Commission's website contain more specific comments about Tesco which we have not covered in our formal submissions.

Some of these specific comments are inaccurate and misleading, and we are providing a series of short notes in order to put the record straight. In the interests of transparency we are today publishing the first such series of notes.

Welwyn Garden City Society

The Welwyn Garden City Society has raised concerns about our interest in the Broadwater Road East site in Welwyn Garden City.

Choice in Welwyn

As the Welwyn Garden City Society (WGCS) points out, residents of Welwyn can currently choose between many different grocery retailers for their shopping (although the nearby Tesco store to which WGCS refers is actually our Hatfield store located five miles away at the junction of the A1(M)).

Welwyn and Tesco

WGCS rightly notes that Welwyn Garden City has a special character of its own, and it is in our interests to preserve this character. We are proud of our contribution to its current "lively and fit" condition. We are a major employer in the town, with around 600 employees at our current stores in the area, and around 3,000 people working at our offices in the Shire Park area of the town.

The Bridgewater Road East site

WGCS has "no objection to Tesco operating from another site", provided it is an appropriate town centre location.

WGCS is concerned that retail provision on the Bridgewater Road East site would have a detrimental effect on the town centre, by shifting its focus. Our policy is to work with the grain of the government’s planning policy which supports town centres. The majority of our new stores are in town centres, or on the edge of centres, and encouraging linked trips with the rest of the town is a key element of any proposal for a new store. We believe that our stores benefit by being part of thriving town centres and we seek to build stores in locations that further enhance the vitality of an area.

We have an interest in the Broadwater East Site – we are part of a consortium of landowners which proposed that the site be allocated for mixed town centre uses (including retail) at the local plan review. The plan ultimately allocated the site for employment purposes, but the planning inspector recommended that a new retail study should look at the future need for additional retail floorspace. This study has not yet been commissioned.

Any retail study recommended by the inspector will hopefully consider this issue, but our view is that the site represents an edge-of-centre opportunity that could be developed without adverse implications for the historic character of the town centre. As with any edge-of-centre site, should any future proposal promote additional retail floorspace as part of the mix of uses, it would have to demonstrate need, satisfy the sequential test and show that the proposal would not have any adverse impact on the vitality and viability of the town centre. WGCS’ concerns would therefore be fully tested before any land use mix was finalised.