Whatever happened to Tescopoly?

January 8th was a milestone for Tesco. After 96 years of dizzying growth that took it from a single market stall to a global giant with over 3,000 stores in the UK alone, Tesco announced 43 store closures and 49 mothballed projects. It also slashed capex from £2bn a year to £1bn, and announced thousands of redundancies. 

“Tesco were not the great hope they told us they were. And they were doing some really dodgy deals. So their comeuppance is well deserved”

They won’t have heard the cheers in Cheshunt when Tescopoly celebrated the news. Not because the anti-supermarket collective didn’t mark the occasion, but because in very recent years, Tescopoly has grown so used to Tesco lurching from one unmitigated disaster to the next that their celebrations are rather more muted than they used to be.

“We share a text saying ‘Woo!’ but rather than uproarious celebration it’s more quiet satisfaction and a smile between fellow campaigners who worked so hard on it,” says Vicki Hird, head of food, land and water at Friends of the Earth, acting policy director at Sustain, and a pivotal figure in the Tescopoly genesis (she also claims credit for dreaming up the name, saying it “came down to Tescopoly or Tes-con”). 

It’s also true that the collective is conscious that it was largely a combination of the global economy and Tesco’s own hubris that has caused its undoing, rather than as a direct result of Tescopoly’s disruptive efforts. Not that it matters. The end result is the same. And, for the time being at least, Tescopoly has got what it wanted - an end to the spread of Tesco. But then again, if Tesco has stopped expanding, what does the future hold for Tescopoly? Where does it go from here?

To answer that question it’s important to go back to the beginning. Formed just under a decade ago, in June 2005, Tescopoly has never been the motley crew of rabble-rousing placard-waving nutjobs it was sometimes perceived to be.

In fact, it has always been a highly organised and motivated collective of independent NGOs, including banana Link, Friends of the Earth, GMB London, Labour Behind the Label, the New Economics Foundation and War on Want, that came together under the Tescopoly banner (a book, also called Tescopoly, came out in 2008, but was unrelated to the original group, although author Andrew Simms has since joined forces with the collective).

Their motivation to team up and fight was twofold: a growing sense of despair at the decimation of diversity on the UK high street they believed was caused by the rapid expansion of the supermarkets, and what they felt was the supermarket’s poor treatment of suppliers. And the two were by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, Tescopoly believed the opposite: that Tesco swelling to gargantuan size was directly linked to it throwing its sizeable bulk around when it came to negotiations with suppliers.

“We were concerned about Tesco’s increasing market share and the power it gave them in the planning system and over the supply chain,” says Hird. “And we are pleased that Tesco’s aggressive tactics, both in terms of planning and treatment of suppliers, have failed and it’s now being held to account. Tesco, as we anticipated, were not the great hope for consumers or farmers or the high street they told us they were. And at the same time they were doing some really dodgy deals. So their comeuppance is well deserved.”

Tough talk, but Hird is keen to stress Tescopoly has never been concerned with just Tesco (despite its Tesco-centric branding and anti-Tesco rhetoric), but with the expansion and business practice of all the supermarkets. However, Tesco was the primary motivating factor for its conception, its rapid growth making it a “bigger problem” than the rest.

“Its market share just kept rising and rising and rising,” says Hird. “And local councils just weren’t capable of stopping it. Tesco’s market share was allowed to grow, and therefore its power was allowed to grow, because the planning system wasn’t working. Councils simply didn’t have the legal capacity to sit in a room with Tesco and their five lawyers, with their five laptops, and argue the case against a new store. Even if the council didn’t want one it was very difficult to fight the application. So it was down to people to curb Tesco’s market share growth through stopping expansion at local level. That’s why I very quickly became an expert in planning and competition law.”

Mezzanine madness

An early success was to shut down a loophole in planning legislation that allowed the installation of mezzanine floors without the need for planning permission (a fight sparked not by Tesco’s actions, but by Asda’s).

“There is just as much of a risk with Aldi and Lidl as the eight we started off with. If their buying power starts to undermine suppliers they risk becoming part of the problem”

“It’s crazy that planning permission is required for a garden fence, but not a major development that can destroy a market town,” Hird blasted in 2005. “We’re delighted the government is planning to take action to tackle the uncontrolled expansion of out-of-town developments, but why has it taken so long? And while the government has dithered, there have been two years of unchecked superstore growth, which has helped wreck town centres and destroy smaller retailers.”

More recently, Tescopoly’s fight to improve the supplier situation enjoyed a tangible victory with the arrival of Groceries Code Adjudicator Christine Tacon in January 2013, an appointment that Tescopoly (which won the backing of MPs, including Andrew George, and the NFU along the way) had fiercely lobbied for since 2005, demanding an independent watchdog to enforce the Supermarkets Code of Practice that was introduced in 2002 (and subsequently replaced by GSCOP in 2010).

Yet the fact the Tescopoly website carries a lengthy list of what it describes as “planning decisions that have gone against supermarkets” suggests its biggest success has been to become what it always set out to be: an advisory portal for anyone seeking to block a proposed supermarket development.

It’s a status quo rooted in its origins as a collective, says Hird. “We wanted a place for people to learn from other campaigns and that is has exactly what it has become. If a group in Norfolk has stopped the development of an unsustainable Tesco, they are able to offer advice and support to someone else at the other end of the country. And the independent campaign groups that spring up have been incredible. Their persistence and determination, when Tesco just kept coming back with new applications, has been incredibly impressive. It’s been great.”

So what now?

Although Tesco’s trials and tribulations have left Tescopoly less busy than it was compared with its “heyday” when Tesco was “practically building a new store every week”, Hird says there are “still individual fights to be had when proposed new stores are unsustainable and when the community wants to.”

In short, just like its nemesis, Tescopoly isn’t going anywhere. Indeed, it currently has 679 active campaigns running across the UK, around 75% of which relate to its old foe. “Tesco isn’t out of the picture,” says Hird.

And although Tescopoly spent its early years primarily fighting large stores, in recent years it has a new focus: 28% of current campaigns relate to c-stores.

“It’s more local stores on the high street now,” says Hird. “For instance, Waitrose is doing a lot of in-town development, so there is potential for them to undermine local farmers’ markets, or veggie boxes, with something that looks very similar. You even have Lidl looking like a farmers’ market on TV. It’s surreal watching those adverts.”

Which brings us neatly to the new kid on the expansion block - Aldi and Lidl, which are both intent on doubling store numbers in the UK. “There is just as much a risk with Aldi and Lidl as the eight supermarkets we started off with when we began,” warns Hird. “If their buying power starts to undermine suppliers, they risk becoming part of the problem.”

That said, she points out that Aldi and Lidl’s emergence as big fans of British produce offers diversity in the buying market, which “is a good thing for suppliers, because it offers them more options to sell to.”

And the relative newcomers appear happy to operate in a post-Tescopoly environment. “I have heard some reasonably positive things about Aldi and Lidl’s supply chain initiatives,” she says. “Although, since we started, we have GSCOP and the GCA, meaning the watchful eye of the Adjudicator will be on them. So they will want to comply.”

And if they don’t, they know who’ll be coming for them.