Asda’s executive chairman Allan Leighton has said the government has become “more and more difficult” to deal with as the supermarket reported another quarter of declining sales while attempting a multi-year turnaround.

Speaking at the Retail Week x The Grocer conference on Tuesday, Leighton said decisions made in Westminster were having a greater impact on business than when he first ran the grocer in the 1990s. “Politics and government have a much more bigger impact on what happens today than they did,” he said, adding that government had grown “more and more difficult” and that companies faced “lots of constraints that businesses have today that are not of their own making”.

Leighton contrasted the current environment with that under Tony Blair’s Labour government, which he said had gone “out of their way to try to engage with businesses”, describing today’s climate as “less helpful”. He said companies ultimately had to “deal with it”, in comments delivered as chancellor Rachel Reeves set out her spring statement.

According to data from Worldpanel, Asda’s sales fell 2.6 per cent in the 12 weeks to 22 February compared with a year earlier, marking the weakest performance among the major grocers. Its market share slipped to 11.5 per cent from 12.3 per cent a year earlier, although that represented an improvement on the previous quarter’s 3.7 per cent decline and left share flat compared with the prior three months.

An Asda spokesman said the figures showed “the progress we are making for customers, having re-established Asda as the cheapest supermarket for families and brought availability back to the levels we saw last June”. He added that as the retailer entered the second year of its turnaround, “market share [is] stabilising and the performance gap versus the rest of the market narrowing”.

Leighton, who returned to Asda in 2024 after leading the business in the late 1990s, has said the recovery will take three to five years. The supermarket has been without a permanent chief executive since 2021, and he told the conference he intended to promote internally, saying he had recruited a “group of really talented executives” and that appointing from within “would be the most sensible thing to do”.

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