I am pleased to have been asked to provide the foreword to this fifth edition of the Jones Lang LaSalle Retail Park OSCAR which has now become established as the benchmarking tool for both owners and occupiers of retail parks.   This research seeks to add clarity to an area that has in the past been a battleground between on one side, park owners and their representatives and on the other side, occupiers and their advisers. Hopefully with this clarity there is less room for misunderstanding and both parties can work together to develop a relationship that will benefit the individual parks and the sector. The analysis to provide the classification of parks is essential to the understanding of cost levels and has become widely accepted.   The size of the database, which now encompasses over a fifth of all multi-let retail parks in the UK is significant in maintaining the credibility and reliability of the results and conclusions. It is significant that of all the OSCAR research that for retail parks covers not only actual service charge expenditure, but also service charge budgets, enabling the publication to be more relevant and to aid in budget assessments. This year I am interested to see that a further analysis has been included to cover a sample of the budgets for the current year (2009) and this has to be a very useful indicator in the current market conditions.  Those involved with operating retail parks are under continuing pressure to achieve cost reductions where possible and value for money both for landlords and tenants and again the benchmarks provided by OSCAR are essential to judging this.  Finally, I would like to thanks Jones Lang LaSalle for collating the data in the report and for presenting the analysis in such a clear and concise manner.       David Diemer    Fund Manager, Aviva Investors