Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) for securing the debate and ensuring that the Backbench Business Committee listened to his remarks. The depth of the conversation that has taken place today has clearly indicated the leadership that he demonstrated.

Before I go any further, may I declare an interest? I still have shares in a company that I set up some five or six years ago, which deals in giving advice to property developers on how to manage public consultation and on ensuring that they get their political messages across. I suspect that in the next five minutes I will demonise myself as being responsible for an awful lot of the problems that have occurred. Some of the people with whom I ended up working were from supermarkets and food retailers, so I have some understanding of what they do.

First, I wish to talk about Plymouth, which is the largest urban conurbation west of Bristol. It is a low-skilled and low-wage economy, and as Members know it is the home—or I should say a home—of the Royal Navy. My constituency runs south of the A38 and from the River Plym to the River Tamar. It has a city centre in it, and I am uniquely a very strong urban Tory. I therefore hope that I can talk about the impact of what is happening.

We were badly bombed during the war, and a lot of the property in the constituency is now beginning to look a little shabby and needs work doing to it. However, we do have a university, which is a key part of ensuring that regeneration takes place. I would be grateful if the university considered how it could include some retail activity on its premises, because there are major implications for the city in July and August when the university has gone down.

There is a proposal by English Heritage to list the city centre, which I do not think is a very clever thing to do. All that will do is put the whole thing into aspic and discourage the growth of the retail sector.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I am interested by what my hon. Friend says about universities and students. In my constituency we have a large university in a town of 50,000 people. Does he agree that when councils and shop builders plan town centres and retail offerings, it is important that they think about not only the student market but, as he says, a year-round market? They have to appeal to both students and non-students for the whole 12 months.

[Oliver Colvile]

I fully agree, and licensed premises are also incredibly important. We now have more licensed premises in Plymouth city centre than there are in the whole of Liverpool, which is quite a striking fact given that the population of Plymouth is about 250,000 and Liverpool’s is significantly bigger. There has been a tendency for local authorities of all political parties in the area to move the culture of Union street, of which those who know Plymouth will be aware, out to Mutley Plain and the Barbican. That has had real implications, including for the local police’s work to maintain law and order. We need a much more balanced approach.

When I was working commercially—Members will be delighted to know that I am not any more, although I do have an interest in my own business—I was aware of how defensive some landowners could get about looking after their stakeholdings. They wanted to ensure that if there was development, it would not affect their commercial interests badly. There was one city in the south of England where we did a lot of work, and I had a client there who owned about £40 million of assets in the town centre. He had great difficulty in talking to the local authority and getting it to work with him to develop his part of the town. It became a very big problem, and it ended up with the local authority trying to get his land by compulsory purchase order, with all the implications that went with that. It is very important that local authorities should not try to be developers by proxy, because that is a disaster. It has delayed the regeneration of that town by a significant time.