The combination of the drinking and smoking plans will inevitably lead to revellers spilling out onto the pavements to have a cigarette - in the early hours of the morning.JAMIE MAYTICEHURST, EAST SUSSEX Public services back to the bad old days Sir: Many years ago the provision of education and health care was in the hands of charities and philanthropists. The schizophrenic nature of the UK economic recovery was exposed yesterday by figures showing a surge in house prices and factory orders but a fall in retail sales and shopper numbers that pointed to another dire Christmas for the high street. The OFT said last night that it would complete the review "as quickly as we practicably can".. "Each deal is below the radar screen but the cumulative impact is now very apparent. I don't think this has happened before in a key sector central to effective competition in the interests of consumers," the executive said.The CAT's ruling yesterday came after the OFT decided not to contest an appeal by the Association of Convenience Stores over the earlier refusal to refer the grocery sector. The OFT asked for eight months to decide whether a referral was necessary, but the tribunal chairman Sir Christopher Bellamy ordered a speedier decision. One supermarket executive said the "salami slicing" fashion in which Tesco was able to grow its market share by new store openings or extensions meant it was government-approved, yet with no overall oversight of the impact on competition.

Its plans include the opening each year of 20 giant Tesco Extra stores, some with a floor space of 100,000 sq ft - seven times the size of a standard supermarket.Justin King, the chief executive of Sainsbury's, has been an outspoken critic of Tesco's untrammelled growth, as has Lee Scott, the chief executive of Asda's parent company, Wal-Mart. Rival supermarkets calculate that this will grow to 42 or 43 per cent within the next six years - and possibly 47 per cent - based on the rate at which Tesco is using its vast land bank to open new superstores.In the past 12 weeks, its share of the till roll in stores of more than 14,000 sq ft - the standard definition used by the OFT to denote a "one-stop" supermarket where a shopper could do an entire weekly shop - stood at 36 per cent, according to industry sources.The fear is that if Tesco's market share is allowed to creep towards 50 per cent, it will have such a dominant position that it will be able to raise prices - enabling its competitors to do likewise.This year Tesco intends to open 2 million sq ft of new floor space. The Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) yesterday quashed a decision by the OFT this year not to refer the supermarket sector and told it to rethink its position.Tesco's share of the grocery market stands at 30.3 per cent - twice that of its nearest rival, Asda - according to figures compiled by the market research group Taylor Nelson Sofres. Philip Hampton, the chairman of J Sainsbury, has lobbied the UK's competition authorities in person in an attempt to check Tesco's growing domination of the grocery market. Mr Hampton, who took over as Sainsbury's chairman in July last year, briefed senior officials at the Office of Fair Trading in late summer about measures the watchdog could take to limit Tesco's rising market share. These could include imposing an absolute cap on the share of the grocery market any one supermarket is allowed, or a change in the regulations so that the competition authorities treat new store openings in the same way as the acquisition of stores from rival supermarkets.Mr Hampton's unprecedented approach to the OFT demonstrates the acute concern felt among rival supermarket groups about Tesco's runaway growth and the long-term implications this could have for consumer choice and grocery prices.It also piles further pressure on the OFT at a time when it is facing increased demands to refer the whole grocery market to the Competition Commission again for a full-blown inquiry. They would have been higher but for the Gate Gourmet strike at Heathrow and July's London bombings, which cost BAA an estimated 500,000 passengers and £5m in profits.BAA is due to give an update next month on the precise costs and positioning of the second runway to be built at Stansted..

Willie Walsh, the new chief executive of British Airways, and Sir Michael Bishop, the chairman of bmi - the two biggest operators at Heathrow - are understood to have backed the cost-cutting drive.Underlying pre-tax profits for the six months to the end of September rose by £18m to £366m. Mr Clasper said over time, the BAA workforce was likely to rise, particularly when Heathrow's Terminal 5 opens in 2008 and Stansted expands to handle 30 million passengers. Most of the new staff will be front-line.Mr Clasper said he expected the "significantly lower costs" BAA planned to achieve to be passed back to its airline customers when airport charges were next reviewed in 2008. He pledged there could be no redundancies among front-line workers such as security staff, baggage handlers and engineers.The cutbacks will reduce the number of administrative and support staff from 3,500 to 2,800 In total BAA employs 12,000 staff. Brendan Gold, the national secretary for civil air transport at the Transport and General Workers' Union, said: "It does give us cause for concern that a company like BAA has bypassed normal consultation and told 700 staff they have an uncertain future."BAA's chief executive Mike Clasper insisted the job cuts were necessary to reduce the cost of serving its airline customers. BAA said the plan would produce annual savings of £45m by 2008-09 at a one-off cost of £90m, the bulk of which will be redundancy payments. Unions at BAA said they were shocked by the scale of the cutbacks, coming on the same day the company announced a 10 per cent rise in operating profits to £416m for the first half of the year. The cutbacks will be concentrated mainly at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted and will reduce the number of managerial, administration and back-office staff at BAA's seven UK airports by 20 per cent over the next three years.