Long term growth
The overall investment requirements for the Optimisation Plan, outlined last year, are £450m over and above the normal run-rate of capital investment, and the programme will run to January 2010. In 2008, £182m of this was invested, bringing the cumulative total to £250m.
Alongside the Optimisation Plan, our new space programme laid out a target of opening an additional 1.0m square feet of retail space in the three years to January 2010. We are well on course to achieve that through our normal pipeline of new stores and store extensions, but over and above this target, the acquisition, announced in November, of smaller Co-op and Somerfield stores, which will complete in 2009, will add around a further 500,000 square feet to our estate to bring the total at 31 January 2010 to approximately 12m square feet.
