High Streets (Built Environment Committee Report)

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased that we have an opportunity to debate last year’s report on the future of high streets from the Built Environment Committee, chaired with such brio by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. It was a very interesting and thoughtful process. We have an opportunity today to consider the Government’s largely positive response. I warn the Minister that I will ask him some detailed questions, although I do not necessarily expect a detailed reply. I am sure that officials will be able to write if necessary.

Most importantly, the Government’s response reflects their sense that the state and prospects of the high street reflect the wider state of the economy and the public realm, and therefore play a critical part in driving, as well as reflecting, national and local growth and renewal. They are part of the national mission. That is very reassuring. I was hopeful for a positive response for the reasons that my noble friend—as he is at the moment as the current chair of the committee—mentioned. Our conclusions are so well evidenced and practical, there should be nothing in this report that is in the “too difficult to implement” box.

The report’s title, Life Beyond Retail?, says it all, in contradiction to the mantra that there is no future for the high street because so much has changed and cannot now be restored. That is primarily in retail, but there are other changes as well. In this context, which is heavy with gloom and doom, we insist that there can be a bright future for the high street, which has evolved over thousands of years to meet changing needs and fashions, but it will take leadership, investment, imagination and innovation.

The Committee will hear a lot in my speech about Lewes, where I have lived for donkey’s years, because it is an exemplar of what is happening, both the worst and the best. Our high street has seen so much change, not to say drama, in its history, which dates back to the Anglo-Saxons. We still have shops with medieval foundations; they were trading in textiles when the Norman castle was being built a millennium ago. We have a 14th-century bookshop. Church, state and law are all physical in our high street. Opposite the county court, in all its magisterial splendour, is the hotel where Tom Paine preached revolution and where people continue to do so—it is that sort of town.

In short, the high street was a stage upon which all dramas played out. It was a marketplace for the community for centuries, but also the place where people met to learn, worship, celebrate, be judged or be improved, both young and old. Much of that community spirit has been retained, but we have lost small supermarkets, butchers, ironmongers, bookshops, post offices and banks. They have largely been replaced, as we have heard, by cafés, charity shops, estate agents, computer shops, hairdressers and nail bars. None of that is unique to Lewes, but it exemplifies in different ways what is happening across the country at different speeds. While the report makes clear that there is no single prescription for a monolithic high street, there would never have been and will never be one.

There are universal explanations for the changes we have seen. The noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, has already touched on retail. My figures show that between March 2020 and March 2022, 9,300 retail units were closed. PwC found that in the first half of 2024 there was a net loss of 2,284. Often, it is the large department stores and chain stores that go first and are most vulnerable. That has been driven by a combination of factors, such as online shopping, which was furiously accelerated by Covid, unaffordable business rates, poor public transport and parking, a run-down and often sordid public realm with few places where people can socialise without paying for it, neglected green spaces, empty churches and a general air of neglect and alienation. It is not a universal condition, but these are universal challenges, and we discuss them all in the report.

This is not a party-political issue. It is a social and economic challenge. The previous Government threw up a host of complex programmes for the medium and short term, which were warmly greeted, but, as the NAO and various reports said, they did not seem to understand what had worked on the high street and the impact of complex funding arrangements. We heard all about that from our witnesses, who said that they have a new funding application to consider every day, and that in the context of a rundown of public capacity.

Our report recognised that the previous Government had made an attempt to plan for the longer term, but in the short term we said that a clear strategy is needed, based on clear leadership, greater local capacity to develop the high street and town centre and ways of involving the community—for example, town centre managers with training and expertise charged with co-ordinating and driving development and more inclusive and engaged partnership for business improvement districts. The report illustrates what we mean by reference to places such as Frome in Somerset. It also needs long-term, sustained investment. The Budget this year confirmed the 75 neighbourhood partnerships and a revised prospectus. Will the Minister say when we can expect the revised prospectus? Why and how will it be different?

We focus on some specific issues, including housing, transport and community engagement. We have had the repurposing of empty department stores or offices for affordable housing under permitted development relaxation, but we have also seen a failure of quality and design and a missed opportunity. We recommended, for example, a review of the use of class E properties. Will this happen? When will we see a review of permitted development rights? We are told that they are in train. What do the Government think they can achieve in terms of good transport and good parking, which they say has a local role? What will be the impact of local government reorganisation on capacity?

One of the core questions is how we support business in the high street. The chain stores are unlikely to come back. The future will lie with those small, necessary, ingenious businesses that we all love and cherish, such as excellent bakers, plant shops or exciting children’s bookshops. These are the reasons people come to the high street. The Government say they will publish their small business strategy. When will it be published? Will it specifically address the issue of the high street? Will the Government maintain the priority given to the town centre-first retail policy within the NPPF? Will they, when they review business rates, have particular regard to the need to consider and simplify the range of business rates relief schemes to support the high street?

We found reasons to be cheerful. We found innovation, leadership and good practice, which can turn terminal decay, if not decline, into a new proposition. The report is full of examples of innovation, such as teenage markets and regeneration through the heritage action zones. Whether it is churches that have lost their congregations or cinemas that have closed, historic buildings are invaluable assets for their social and collective possibility. The ability to buy those to turn them into local markets, child centres, workshops and climate hubs can really engage people in reimagining what the high street could look like.

We were told by young people, businesspeople and local leaders alike to give the community more power to design the future they want. They want to be involved in this new vision for their high street. The Government have said that they intend

“to commence a package of plan-making reforms … to improve the quality of community engagement”.

Where have we got to on that? The Government say they will invest in initiatives to boost town and city centres, including high street accelerators. I do not really know what that means. I would be grateful for a further explanation.

One of the most positive and popular developments is to reimagine the high street as the place where things can get done and not just bought. The opportunities are there to put in place some of those public services which have disappeared from view because they are increasingly online, and the people who lose out are the people who are in greatest need—the poor, the elderly, the young—who want to talk to somebody, who want advice face to face.

For example, my high street now has a brilliant local authority outlet where complicated questions about a new garden waste bin—I will not bore the Committee with the details—can be sorted in five minutes rather than five hours online. The possibilities are endless: housing offices; walk-in surgeries for routine vaccinations and diagnostic tests; toy libraries for young mums with small babies and giant buggies; repair cafés for the things that have to be thrown away because there is nobody to repair them; empty shop windows where the local university can show some of the work it is doing; empty shops that can be converted into pop-up galleries for FE art students to display their work—the ideas are endless and excellent and they are there, in the community, waiting to be put into place with imagination. They are about experience and quality, not retail.

Our report creates an imaginative future for the high street. I really hope that the Government will take it and do something with its recommendations as part of their wider set of policy proposals.