Written for publication by the Guardian’s Local Government Network

A year ago I was championing Chippenham Vision and Wiltshire Council as a beacon of localism in practice. The Council was embracing community-led planning and involving the community and other stakeholders in master planning a major town centre development that would enhance the riverside location and help bring people in to town for shopping and relaxation.

So how genuinely disillusioning after a year where we have talked localism and High Streets with high expectations, to find that the approval of an extension to an out-of-town supermarket has knocked the plans off-track.

With CBRE Ltd.i reporting last month that there are 44.4million sq ft of new supermarkets already in the pipeline for 2012, Chippenham will not be the last town to have its regeneration plans set-back by the expansion of out-of-town retail. At a seminar jointly-held by the Town and Country Planning Association and AMT in March last year, TCPA Chief Planner Hugh Ellis commented on the direct link between the rapid growth of out-of-town retail over the last decade, and the weakness of the government’s so-called Town Centres First policy that was designed to check such expansion. Something echoed by AMT’s members on the ground.

As Minister Grant Shapps prepares his Spring response to Mary Portas’ High Street Inquiry, at AMT we urge the him to put the strengthening of the Towns Centres First policy at the top of his list. This will help level the playing field between locations and competing supermarket chains and will aid council planning committees in their quest to plan sustainably for their communities. Without this, the risk is that the decline of even healthy town centres will be accelerated.

If such a breach in the planning floodgate is repaired, we could all look forward to lasting benefits from more creative solutions like those so clearly documented in the recent paper on Twenty First Century Town Centresii written by Urban Pollinators and published by AMT ahead of the Portas Review.

At AMT, we believe that such innovative revitalisation of our towns centres should be based on firm evidence and we have developed a Town Centre Benchmarking system that gathers and compares key performance indicators such as footfall and business occupancy rates. This enables comparisons to be made between similar towns and from year to year. The system has now been used by over 100 towns across the country including with councils like Cheshire East that benchmarks all its market towns as well as Crewe and Macclesfield.

We have a bank of case studies of good practice from councils, communities and businesses working together creatively to maintain vibrant own centres. Schemes like Love Local Life in Cheshire that mimics and improves on good practice by supermarkets through rewarding shoppers for their loyalty in using local independent retailers.

So please Mr Shapps, can you grant my New Year wish to strengthen the Town Centres First policy early in 2012 and give councils and communities the confidence that their creativity will not be undermined.