Retail and Hospitality Sector

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on securing this debate. I also congratulate our new colleagues on their maiden speeches, which were both entertaining and informative. I am sure we will hear more from the other maiden speakers as the debate goes on.

I do not have personal experience of the hospitality sector, other than that, as a Minister, I had responsibility for tourism. However, I was engaged for a large part of my life, as was my family, in retail, and I think there are a couple of areas that we have not touched on today. One of them is the fact that customers’ habits are changing and have been for many decades. The traditional shops on the high street, with produce spilling out on to the pavement, have passed—probably because somebody with a clipboard wants to ensure that the pavement is not cluttered up. The other big thing is online retail, which has had a huge impact.

We need to focus on the fact that we do not have, and have never really had, a proper system for dealing with town centre and city centre retail. First of all, we make life as difficult as possible for people to get into it. That comes back to parking—inadequate or expensive parking, with wardens running around issuing tickets. How is anybody going to buy anything of substance if they are forced on to public transport in the pouring rain? People are not going to do it; they are just going to go somewhere where they can stop at the door. That was the lesson of America over many decades. The other factor is that the smaller units in town centres have rates that are much higher per square foot than out-of-town shopping centres—the supermarkets and big stores are a classic example of that.

We all want to support tackling climate change, but we have to be realistic. If going into the town or city centre becomes more and more expensive and difficult, people will go somewhere else, because they have options. We need to re-engineer our town centres. We have talked about it—it has been around for years—but nobody has actually done it. It seems that all I hear of, even at home in the last couple of days, is significant retailers packing in because a Marks & Spencer, say, has moved out of a town centre to a shopping centre on the edge of town. Footfall drops and the local retailer is left high and dry.

Whatever way you look at it, rates are an enormous cost. When you add the cost of employing people, you get to the “Why bother?” stage. I have been in local government for 25 years, and local councils depend heavily on business rates for their revenue. There is a temptation to say, “Oh, big business can cope with it”. That is true to some extent, but it is not true in town centres by and large because the big battalions—the Sainsbury’s and the Tescos—apart from their express units, go outside. We have changed habits, and we have not managed to mix residential, retail and hospitality in our town centres in a sensible way. All we get is vape shops, charity shops and so on, proliferating in these places and making the town centres completely unpleasant environments.

Looking at the totality of the challenges that our retail sector is facing, I have to say to the Government and the Minister that he needs to take this back to his colleagues because it needs to be rethought. What we are doing is taking the existing problems and simply making them worse. Some local authorities, for a perfectly legitimate reason of trying to improve climate change, are actually forcing people out and making life so difficult that people are not prepared to go into retail. I hope that this debate will stimulate the Minister to bring it back to his colleagues, because I think there is a widespread feeling on all sides of the House that much more needs to be done.