The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7229 p877
21/28 December 2002

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The Office of Fair Trading (more)
New Economics Foundation (www.neweconomics.org)

OFT control of entry report delayed until new year

The long-awaited report from the Office of Fair Trading on the control of entry into pharmacy contracts has been delayed until January 2003 at the earliest.

A spokeswoman for the OFT told The Journal that the report is now expected to be published "early in the new year". The OFT had previously said that it would publish the report before the end of 2002 and had been expected to hold a press conference to do so this week.

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee has speculated that one reason why the publication of the OFT report was postponed from this week was to avoid its simultaneous appearance with a report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) think tank. This has suggested that neighbourhood shops in Britain's smaller towns and villages are approaching economic collapse.

The NEF report "Ghost town Britain" (PDF 280K) says that roughly one-fifth of all small local shops and services, around 30,000 businesses, closed between 1995 and 2000 and that over the next 10 years it could reach a third of businesses on current trends. It suggests that if the number of small shops in a locality falls below a critical mass there could be a "tipping point" beyond which local economies collapse as the amount of money circulating is insufficient to maintain all the businesses. Furthermore, it suggests that this point could be approaching rapidly.

The report says that such neighbourhoods would then "become food and enterprise deserts with poor nutition and ill health (eg, diabetes, heart disease and mental health problems)" and that there would be knock on effects to the local economy and environment through the loss of part-time jobs, increased vandalism and other crime and increased car use.

The report calls on the Government to review the rules governing the opening of new supermarkets and the prices they charge, extend discretionary rate relief to small stores, public houses and community pharmacies where local economies are in decline and support the use of experimental local currencies.

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