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Memorandum from the Department for Communities and Local Government (PPS6 05)
I am writing in response to your letter of 5 June accompanying one from British Council of Shopping Centres (BCSC) of 18 May asking CLG to respond to BCSC's request for us to deliver our "commitment of 1995 to improve information for retail planning, specifically to provide annual data for new retail floorspace by location (town centres and outside town centres) by region and by local authority". In addition, you ask us to respond to BCSC's contention that "Communities and Local Government (CLG) have a computer system in place which could deliver this data within a month or two". As we agreed given the short timescale for response, this letter is an official level response and has not been discussed with Ministers.
First, I
should be clear that CLG has already moved some way towards improving its
information prior to BCSC's request.
Since the July 2008 statistical publication referred to in BCSC's
letter, CLG has released a further update of the proportion of newly built
retail floorspace in town centres. This statistical release, Extent of retail development taking place in
The
release details the proportion of total new build retail floorspace built in
town centre and edge of centre locations in
This release will be the first of a series of annual statistical releases to help monitor the impact of Planning Policy Statement 6, Planning for Town Centres and its successor document, Planning Policy Statement 4 Planning for Prosperous Economies. In summer 2009, we plan to publish a national and regional update for new build retail development in the 2007 calendar year for properties as they existed at 1 April 2008.
BCSC contend that CLG have a computer system that could deliver data by individual local authority and potentially by town centres and retail type. I can confirm that CLG does hold a database that can be interrogated at different spatial scales and by type of retail use. We will investigate the potential for breaking these data down below regional level as part of the preparation for the forthcoming summer 2009 statistical release.
However, we may be constrained in how far we can go, for example down to individual centre level, by the requirement to avoid the potential disclosure of information relating to individual properties.
Under the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, the department is required to take reasonable steps not to reveal the identity of an individual or organisation, or any private information relating to them, taking into account other relevant sources of information. Taking these steps is a both a pre-condition of receiving the underlying data from the Valuation Office Agency that our statistics rely on and of publishing aggregates on the UK Statistics Authority Publication Hub.
In practice, the smaller the spatial scale the greater the risk is that information relating to an individual will be identifiable and therefore would need to be excluded from the statistical release. Many individual town centres may only see a single new build in a given year and so will be too small a scale to allow publication of meaningful information for many parts of the country.
Turning to the issue of whether we should present our data by reference to sub categories of overall retail, we are currently constrained by our data which we source from the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). This data identifies some of the sub categories that go to make up the overall retail category in a different way from our own Use Classes Order and so it would be inaccurate to break down the overall total as suggested by BCSC.
However, we are confident that the data supplied by the VOA provides a robust estimate of total new build retail floorspace to the extent required to monitor our town centre first policy. Accordingly, we are not convinced of the case for further disaggregation of this type.
I hope this shows the Committee that CLG takes the issue of providing accurate, robust data seriously and is committed to effective monitoring of government policies.
June 2009 |