Further evidence on linked trips and foodstore development

Abstract

The comprehensive practice guidance document1
prepared by GVA Grimley for the Department for
Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and
published alongside the recently issued Planning
Policy Statement 4 (PPS4): Planning for Sustainable
Economic Growth2 consistently stresses the
importance of ‘linked trips’ in underpinning the town
centre policies set out in PPS4:
‘the... objective is to seek to accommodate main
town centre uses in locations where customers
are able to undertake linked trips in order to
provide for improved consumer choice and
competition. In this way the benefits of the new
development will serve to reinforce the vitality
and viability of the existing centre.
In that context, it is perhaps unsurprising that our
recent Town & Country Planning article on ‘Linked
trips and town centre viability’,4 which provided new
evidence on this issue drawn from a study of the
relocation of a previously ‘out-of-centre’ foodstore to
an ‘edge-of-centre’ site, has generated considerable
interest, or that our findings have rapidly found their
way into the planning process.5 Nevertheless, as
we suggested in that article, the available evidence
base on linked trips which the UK planning
community can draw on remains extremely
restricted. In particular, evidence relating to the past
decade of increasingly effective implementation of‘town centres first’ approach to planning policy and
a new generation of proposals for retail
developments ‘with the grain’ of that policy is scant.
Our purpose in this short follow-up article is to
begin the process of presenting that missing
evidence. In particular, we position the evidence on
linked-trip propensities documented in our original
article within the ‘range’ of figures obtained in the
wider investigation of foodstore developments in
market towns and district centres from which that
study was drawn. In that way we are able to provide
contemporary evidence on the likely spectrum of
linked-trip propensity levels and on the extent to
which positioning of cases within the spectrum
relates to commonly accepted determinants of
linked-trip generation. Finally, we draw out some
new, and potentially policy-significant, findings on
these issues.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Neil Wrigley: orcid.org/0000-0002-3967-5668

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