News

The seventh annual ACS Heart of the Community conference will be taking place on Tuesday 21st October from 12.00pm – 3.30pm.

The conference, held in Westminster, brings retailers from across the country together with MPs and Ministers to discuss important issues facing local shops. 

The event will be chaired by journalist, Daisy McAndrew.

ACS has called on its members to support the Home Office’s Commercial Victimisation Survey, which provides crucial information to Government on how businesses in England and Wales are affected by crime.

We hear from CAMRA this morning that 31 pubs are closing each week. I’ll start and finish this blog with a personal observation you may wish to dismiss as just that.

ACS has responded to the 2015 Manifesto published by the All Party Group on Alcohol Misuse.

The Group, which is a forum for MPs and Peers sympathetic to the policy objectives of alcohol health campaigners, has set out a ten point wish list of measures they would like to see imposed by the next Government. It includes minimum unit pricing, health warnings on alcohol labels and new powers for Councils to prevent the opening of new off licences.

The ACS Crime Seminar will be held at Greater Manchester Police HQ, on Tuesday 2nd September. The Crime Seminar is a fantastic opportunity to share best practice, network with industry experts and hear the latest from retailers, police forces and local authorities about how they are tackling retail crime.

ACS has called for Government to scrap plans to impose a cap on the size of business that is eligible for compensation under the Riot Damages Act. 

The Riot Damages Act that was used to assess compensation during the 2011 riots was originally published in 1886.

ACS has called on the Department of Health to look again at the operational impact that plain tobacco packaging would have on retailers.

In its submission, ACS raises concerns that the operational burdens of standardized packaging on retailers have not been fully considered. ACS argues that the removal of branding on tobacco products would make those products more difficult to differentiate, increasing handling and transactions times at every stage.

A couple of interesting statistics have come to light in the past week that are relevant to ACS’s long running campaign on effective town centre first planning policy. The first was broadcast as part of a Dispatches programme that aired last week on the fate of the big four supermarkets. They commissioned Glenigans to look at what had happened to supermarkets' plans to invest in new stores.

On September 10th, ACS will be launching the latest edition of its flagship research project, The Local Shop Report 2014, at an exclusive event at The Studio in Birmingham.

The report brings together new ACS research with existing data from him!, William Reed and IGD to give a compelling snapshot of the convenience sector today. Previous reports have been used in the industry by retailers, suppliers, Government, academics and analysts as the baseline for understanding the local shop market.

ACS has hailed a new consultation from energy regulator Ofgem as the beginning of the end for rollover contracts.

In the consultation, published today, Ofgem have announced that they will be monitoring the activity of suppliers who still use automatic rollover contracts for their customers over the next six months. Ofgem have stated that if it cannot be proven that rollover contracts provide a tangible benefit to business consumers, there will be no place for them in the market in the future.