Competition report is divorced from reality
London Road in St Albans, Hertfordshire, leads travellers from the south to the heart of the city, with its magnificent Norman cathedral, and a Roman museum and historic remains. Sadly, the view drivers and passengers get is one not of history but dereliction.
One long section of the road is lined with boarded up, crumbling and unsightly buildings. They are former shops, offices and houses. The buildings have not been left to rot as a result of urban decay. St Albans is a sought-after city to live in. Properties are quickly bought and sold, often at grossly-inflated prices.
The buildings have been left to go to rack and ruin and become an eyesore because they belong to Tesco. The giant supermarket group bought the buildings in London Road as part of a speculative plan to build a new superstore on the site of a large and long-empty printing works that lies behind the road.
There is massive opposition to the new store in St Albans. The citizens say the city has plenty of supermarkets, including a Tesco in the city centre - the original Tesco store - two branches of Sainsbury's with a third close by in London Colney, a Morrisons, a Budgens and a Waitrose.
People are also worried about the extra traffic a Tesco superstore would generate. London Road, despite its grand name, is narrow and easily congested. The fear is that Tesco would attract shoppers from nearby towns and villages and the heart of the city would become a permanent traffic jam.
Tesco has been fighting a long battle to get planning permission for its new store. The gloomy consensus is that, as part of a war of attrition conducted by expensive lawyers, Tesco will finally win the day with the planners.
The company is not alone in this sort of behaviour. All the big supermarkets buy up land and leave it fallow for years simply to stop their rivals opening new stores. None of them gives a hang if once attractive urban and suburban areas become wastelands.
This situation forms part of the background to the astonishing report into the activities and business practices of the supermarkets by the laughably-named Competition Commission. Its report was so divorced from reality that it could have been culled from the pages of a novel by the Czech writer Franz Kafka in which the world is turned upside down and the innocent are found guilty of terrible crimes.
The commission's findings are Kafka in reverse. So you thought the supermarket were aggressive bullies, forcing smaller retailers out of the market and ruining suppliers who can't afford the discounts demanded of them? Think again. In the dull prose of the commission, "below-cost selling by national retailers is not part of a predatory strategy aimed at convenience stores or specialist stores and is not having significant unintended effects on smaller stores". Tell that to the Marines.
The most astonishing aspect of the report is that the commission cleared the Big Four supermarket chains - Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Tesco - of selling cut-price booze. The media is awash with stories - often highly inflated and even downright dishonest - about binge drinking. Pubs, quite unfairly and without an iota of evidence, get the blame for this. Yet the supermarkets get off scot-free, without a stain on their reputation.
Last week, purely in the interests of research, a display card in my local Budgens happened to fall into my shopping trolley. This offers a 20-pack of San Miguel lager for £10.99, a saving of £9 on the recommended price. The ever-helpful people at Budgens explain on the card that this special offer amounts to the beer being sold for the equivalent of £1.83 a litre.
No wonder pubs are going out of business. The commission finds nothing wrong in this situation even though recent figures show the Big Four sold booze worth £112.7m below cost during the last football World Cup.
The lamentable conclusion of the commission is that we need not fewer but more supermarkets. Here in St Albans we need a new Tesco like a hole in the head.
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