Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Alex Norris)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) for securing this important debate and for the spirit in which he has led it. Despite this being a half-hour debate—one of the shorter ones—the interest from colleagues, shown through interventions and through being here to listen, demonstrates the importance of town centres and their health to all our communities, wherever we are across the UK.
My hon. Friend’s diagnosis of the challenge was really well put, because although no two town centres are the same, all our town centres face the same problems: lower occupancy rates and footfall due to economic headwinds and changing consumer habits; the legacy of austerity on public amenities; and hollowed-out high streets becoming a breeding ground for crime and antisocial behaviour, which then feeds a vicious cycle that affects the confidence of consumers and investors alike. That is true in Basingstoke, it is true in Bulwell in my constituency and it is true in the constituencies of colleagues across the room. This is an important debate for us all—it is a significant debate for the Government of the day and for Parliament.
I was struck by what my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke said about the entrepreneurial spirit in his community, which was echoed by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger). As we see across the country, there are brilliant business owners who are taking risks, bringing their ideas forward and making them real under very difficult circumstances. Quite rightly, they are not looking for the Government to operate their enterprises, but they are looking for the Government to make their life easier, which is entirely reasonable.
Today I will cover the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke and talk about some of the support that will be coming from the new Government. I will also reference that critical underpinning—that whatever we do, whatever support we give to business, and however good the trading environment, we have to have safe communities. If we do not have those, even if we have all the other pieces, people will still not feel safe and will not be able to visit their town centres, and businesses will not be able to thrive.
I will start with the high street itself. My hon. Friends the Members for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) and for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) referenced high street rental auctions, so I will start there. In December we brought forward new powers for local authorities to require landlords who have persistently vacant properties to bring those properties back into use. The new regulations will make the tenancies more accessible and affordable for tenants, and give local businesses and community enterprise a right to rent valuable space on their high street. We are calling time on those persistent vacancies, and this will be a significant development in reducing vacancies and improving footfall along the way.
We have heard about the work going on in Bournemouth. We are also working with Bassetlaw, Darlington and Mansfield as early adopters, and I want as many areas to come forward as possible. I encourage colleagues to talk to their local authorities about getting the best out of these powers. There is also a lot of insight that we can support them with centrally. If they lean into this, it could be a really good way of addressing vacancy rates and of giving business and local community enterprises their first steps.
We will continue to invest in the high street accelerator model and from that learn what else we can do to improve communities across the country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke mentioned, that model is telling us a lot about partnership between local communities, businesses, and property owners, who want to see their communities thrive. We also heard about business improvement districts convening that family of interested parties to drive forward a shared vision for an area.
At the moment, the overheads are really challenging—the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) put it very elegantly as the “cost of doing business crisis”. As the Government of the day, we want to help and to ameliorate that situation. Retail, hospitality and leisure form the backbones of our high streets, and support our local economies and communities, providing jobs and attracting visitors, but they cannot do that with a chokehold on them, as my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke said. He asked for more specifics on permanently lowering tax rates for such ventures. From 2026-2027, we intend to introduce permanent tax cuts for those with rateable values of less than £500,000. Those businesses will have certainty going forwards, not having to wait from Budget to Budget to see if cuts have been maintained; they will be baked in. Indeed, I believe that legislation has been making its way today. It means that businesses will have certainty around costs, so that they can plan and can operate their businesses in a profitable way.
There are other ways in which we can make life easier, including by tackling the scourge of late payments and long payment terms. That is a theme we hear constantly when we talk to small business and self-employed people. We are therefore introducing a new fair payment code, and we want people to engage with it to make sure that it works for real—for the way in which they do their business—and they are not caught in the ripple effects of bigger organisations that do not pay on time. That is an important point on support.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke about the importance of energy costs, which we know have been a problem domestically and for businesses. There are businesses now that were in a cycle of contracting when markets were at their most challenging and which are now locked into longer deals. We encourage businesses or non-domestic organisations to engage with suppliers about moving away from contracts agreed at higher prices and instead move towards approaches such as blend and extend contract to try to reduce costs. That would give short-term relief.
What we have to do in the medium and long term—as my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke said—is transition away from fossil fuels and towards home-grown, clean energy through the establishment of Great British Energy. In December, we took steps with our 2030 action plan, outlining our efforts in this regard. That will mean there will be access to clean, green energy, and that there will be domestic jobs and more money in people’s pockets—the single biggest problem affecting my town is that people simply do not have enough money in their pockets to shop. We will be winning each way: keeping bills down with better energy, and putting support and vitality back into our communities with jobs too.
My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke mentioned transport, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Southend East and Rochford (Mr Alaba). Reliable bus and public transport services are vital to the economic success of our high streets. At the back end of last year, we made announcements about the £5.7 billion long-term transport settlement to transform the local transport networks of our largest city regions, helping to drive growth and productivity, and perhaps bringing back into use those routes that have been lost. There is also a further £650 million for local transport outside city regions in the forthcoming year, to make sure that we can improve connections between our towns, villages and rural areas as well as our major cities. On 17 December, we introduced the Bus Services (No. 2) Bill, which will put power over local bus services back into the hands of local leaders, so that those decisions reflect the nature of the local community and public transport gets to the right places.
On driving footfall and making sure that the high street has the amenities that our constituents want and need, we are also pushing hard on the roll-out of banking hubs. I know, having talked to colleagues, that that is of significant interest across the country. We have plans to roll out 350 such hubs, and there is plenty of work to do on that. Again, this is about having anchors on the high street that mean that people routinely come in and out of their town centre and, while they are there, perhaps go for a cup of tea or whatnot. We need those staples come what may, and that is an important way of making sure that we protect banking.
The hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke) talked about some of the ways in which Government have funded projects previously. To be clear—I could speak for another hour on this—we want to move away from the competitive, beauty parade-style bidding process that has pitted communities against each other, created a lot of disappointment and, frankly, been less than the sum of its parts. Our approach to local growth funding will be more integrated settlements over the longer term, with less central direction and more local choice. We think that will get the money to the areas that need it. In the meantime, we have the UK shared prosperity fund and the transition year there. I know that that is important for Northern Ireland—I have had the chance to see some of the services it pays for there—and across the country. Colleagues can look for more information about that when we get to the multi-year spending review later this year.
In the time remaining, I will move on to a couple of points about safety in town centres, raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern). As the Chancellor’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, he is surely our man with a direct line on the spending review and other things. The point about safety is so important. My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke has, like me, raised the issue of car meets. This has, at times, really dogged my town, making me want to tear my hair out. In order to push these kinds of behaviours out of our town, we have had to chase them and really be on top of it. The issue has caused misery and anxiety, and people do not want to leave their houses because they do not think they are safe. That is also true for crime in town centres more generally.
My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke mentioned that terrible phrase, which I absolutely hate: “low-level crime”. The previous Government ceded ground around theft below £200, which has led to an explosion of stealing and other types of antisocial behaviour in our towns. That has made working in a retail environment a misery for people at times. We see staggering levels of violence, which we have to address. That is at the core of our safer streets mission, and we are committed to restoring neighbourhood policing through our neighbourhood policing guarantee—13,000 more police and police community support officers as a visible deterrent.
My hon. Friend also asked about timelines and where we are in the process. On 5 December, the Prime Minister announced our Plan for Change, which committed to a zero tolerance approach to ASB. That means a dedicated lead officer in every force, working with communities to work up a local antisocial behaviour plan. There are also our recently announced respect orders, which will give police and local council stronger enforcement powers, so that proper action is taken to change the behaviours of people who are persistently disruptive—others in our towns could name those people, and retail workers certainly could. This means banning them from the amenity they are disrupting, but also tackling the root cause of their behaviour through, for example, mandated alcohol and drug treatment. If people break respect orders, there are significant penalties, with offenders facing up to two years imprisonment—a real deterrent.
We want to tackle the root cause. For time out of mind, the behaviour of young people around town centres has been a challenge, whether they are on bicycles or causing shopkeepers challenges. Through our young futures programme, we want to give young people a positive thing to do, but it is also a chance to tackle and reduce offending where it happens. Together, all these things will make our communities safer for people to live, work and visit.
I am coming to the end of my speech, so I will probably leave it there. There are important points to be made about housing and our role in ensuring that, as more housing is created in town centres, it is done in a sensible and planned way with local communities. I think most people would accept the value of that—but if there is not proper planning and co-ordination, we end up with units in different places, as well as the weird and desperately sad situation where people move next door to a pub that may have been there for many years and then put in public order and nuisance complaints, leading to the pub closing down. We have to plan these things, so that residents can live alongside business in a way that promotes all of their interests.
To conclude, the interest that my colleagues have shown means that we could have gone on for a very long time. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke for securing the debate; it is a really brilliant way to start the new year. Our town centres are the beating hearts of our communities, and the Government are committed to giving that support. We will continue to engage with business to make sure the things we are doing are reaching the places they need to, and we will also work on that with our parliamentary colleagues. There is an awful lot to consider in terms of business support and public safety, so now is the time to grab this for our town centres—for my community, and for all of our communities. I think we can make a real difference.
Question put and agreed to.