How Yorkshire town centres can keep their M&S branches - from the horse's mouth: Chris Burn
I was among the thousands of people who attended the UKREiiF real estate conference in Leeds last week – an event that seems to be growing in size, popularity and political clout every year.
Indeed the programme is so packed that it is simply impossible to see every discussion you’d like to but one particularly fascinating event I was able to attend took place with Marks & Spencer chairman and retail industry veteran Archie Norman.
Mr Norman is no stranger to Leeds as a former chief executive of Asda and opened his 45-minute discussion with business journalist Graham Ruddick with an amusing anecdote of heading to the city for the first time to start his role with the supermarket. Other passengers on the packed train started chatting about where they were heading but only got him to reveal he was on his way to take over Asda as he was leaving the carriage. With that, he confidently stepped off the train and into his new life – only to realise he had got out at Doncaster.
While that may have been a misstep, Mr Norman was on much surer footing as he opened up in some detail about Marks & Spencer’s strategy to remodel its business by cutting down its number of traditional ‘full line’ stores and increasing its number of food halls.
‘Full line’ stores – offering all the products associated with M&S from clothing to homeware and food – aren’t disappearing but their numbers are in the process of being cut substantially from 247 back in 2022 to an eventual 180 by next April.
Mr Norman revealed to the event that M&S is now down to 230 full line stores but actually intends to close a further 80 existing buildings before reopening 30. Those reopenings are expected to be a mixture of either remodelling existing stores or, more commonly, moving to more suitable nearby locations. The strategy is driven in part by M&S having many ageing town centre buildings set over multiple floors which are proving highly costly to maintain.
Mr Norman also demonstrated a great deal of candour by outlining M&S’s decision-making strategy and effectively laid down to the gauntlet to council bosses in Yorkshire and beyond about what it will take to keep an M&S store in their town centre.
He said: “There’s multiple examples where you have got a thriving centre, an enlightened local authority with a holistic regeneration programme to bring everything together and we really want to be part of that. But where you have got stasis and decline and there’s no holistic plan and spending power is diminishing and accessibility is even worse, it is not going to work for us.
"We’re so keen to work with local authorities and developments to find solutions but they’ve got to be imaginative solutions. Otherwise, we are leaving and we’re going out of town.
"There are multiple towns today where we are looking at when we are going to go and we’d love it if the local authority leaders would come together and find a solution for us. But if they can’t, we are going.”
He gave the example of Colchester where moving out of an ageing town centre building to a new site on a nearby retail park had resulted in sales doubling but also highlighted new openings in central locations in thriving places like Bristol, Bath and Liverpool.
The challenge for Yorkshire council leaders keen to keep their M&S will be to ensure they fall into the latter category.
Chris Burn is The Yorkshire Post’s head of business and features