At the turn of the millennium, Sainsbury’s bosses announced brightly they hoped to create a supermarket for the people of Wolverhampton within three years.

Eight years later and the story is quite different. After one of the city’s longest planning wrangles, Sainsbury’s has lost out to its bitter rival Tesco for the right to build a multi-million pound development at Raglan Street. And many might say supermarket chiefs only have themselves to blame.

After years of indecision from Sainsbury’s, it was Tesco’s seemingly constant commitment to redeveloping two of the city’s most depressing sites that helped it seal the deal.

This morning Sainsbury’s was poised to release a statement on its action plan. As owner of 80 per cent of the land, it will now have to agree to sell it to its main competitor or battle through a drawn-out planning inquiry, where it could face a compulsary purchase order.

If it remains defiant, it could be several more years before transformation work starts.

Wolverhampton’s Tory regeneration spokesman councillor Neville Patten said today it could still be at least two years before anything started to build on the site – and that was if the supermarkets sorted things out amicably.

But he added: “I am glad to see that at long last a solution has been found for Raglan Street. It has become a bit of a joke in the city and many people can’t see why it has taken so long to resolve.”

It has been almost a decade since the Raglan Street story unfolded. In 1999 regeneration chiefs identified the site as an ideal place for a new supermarket, which Wolverhampton was in desperate need of.

Sainsbury’s stepped in almost immediately and following a planning inquiry in 2003, won permission to create a store there.

But a year later, it pulled out, and Tesco immediately came to the forefront with its own plans.