High Streets (Designation, Review and Improvement Plan) Bill

Debate between Lord Evans of Rainow and Viscount Hanworth

2nd reading
Friday 17th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I should begin by mentioning that I am a current member of the Built Environment Committee, which is engaged in considering the state of Britain’s high streets.

The Bill that we are discussing today has excellent intentions and I strongly support it. It proposes that local authorities should have a watching brief over the health and development of a high street in their area and that they should have a development plan that should be reviewed at least every five years. At the best of times, this requirement should serve to reaffirm the good practices that one would expect well-run local authorities to be adopting as a matter of course. However, nowadays is not the best of times, and the authorities will struggle to fulfil the injunctions of the Bill in meaningful ways. Many of them lack the personnel to conduct proper appraisals of local problems and to formulate plans to address them.

There was a time when local authorities could be expected to react with enthusiasm to this Bill. They were endowed with planning departments that typically contained a full complement of architects, surveyors, town planners and other professionals, and they were responsible for, among other concerns, overseeing the stock of council housing and adding to it. Such housing provided shelter for a large proportion of the population.

The policy that gave the right to buy to council tenants was initiated in 1982 during the Thatcher era. It divested the authorities of much of this housing stock, and they were prevented from replenishing it. The planning departments lost much of their personnel and their sense of initiative.

The present Government have aimed numerous poorly funded initiatives at addressing the decline of the town centres and high streets. Many of these fall under the so-called levelling-up agenda. The current web page of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which is from July 2023, lists a bewildering variety of funds aimed at urban regeneration. I have counted 15 of them. The overview on the web page states:

“In the Levelling Up White Paper, the government committed to setting out a plan for simplifying and streamlining the funding landscape and to help local stakeholders navigate funding opportunities”.


This testifies to the difficulties and expenses incurred by local authorities in making applications for funding.

A common testimony of local authorities is that insufficient resources are available for developing a bid, which may be accompanied by a judgment that it is not worth their while to do so. Even if these impediments were overcome and if the money for regeneration were amply available, a more fundamental impediment could block the progress. Local authorities lack sufficient influence over the activities in high streets to address the problems of urban regeneration.

Few occupants of commercial town centre properties are also their owners. A figure of 12.8% has been cited for the proportion of private individual landlords and owner-occupiers. The ownership of the majority of properties resides in the portfolios of real estate investment trusts and other private interest companies, such as insurance and pension funds, where individual properties feature as lines on a spreadsheet.

The rent payable to owners places a heavy burden on the retailers. The burden is heaviest in times of economic recession when the income from trading is reduced; it may force the retailers into bankruptcy. There is little direct engagement of the property owners with the tenants. Although both parties are charged with the upkeep of the properties, there is little incentive to enhance them since much of the benefit from doing so will accrue to the other party. When properties fall vacant, there seems to be little urgency on the part of owners to find new occupants, and there may be good reason for this. The principal characteristic of a property from the point of view of an investment fund is its capital value, which is tied to its rent. To reduce the rent in an attempt quickly to attract a tenant will destroy that value.

Short-term letting to independent retailers may be unprofitable. Among the inducements to a new tenant there are liable to be deferments of rent and contributions to fitting-out costs, which cannot be afforded easily by small independent retailers. Whereas, in the past, retail leases could be for as long as 20 years, they are now expected to be of a limited duration. Moreover, the high rates of failure among small start-up enterprises deters property owners from accepting such tenants.

The planning departments of local authorities face an intractable problem in motivating a collection of remote and disengaged agents to co-operate in any plans they might have for urban renewal and regeneration. Matters were quite different in the early post-war years, when urban reconstruction was an urgent priority. Much of our modern environment was created in that era. One can conjure up an image of a post-war architect or planning officer airily waving their hand over a tabletop model corresponding to a large derelict area that was set for redevelopment. The tabletop would be covered with small, white rectilinear boxes representing buildings in the modernist style. The person demonstrating the plan might have been dressed in an imitation of the sartorial style of the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known commonly by the pseudonym Le Corbusier.

We have come to regret the depredations of the cheap modern architecture that accompanied this post-war redevelopment; we should remember its vigour and ambition, which we might wish to recapture. We look for contemporary examples of such enterprise, but they are rare. Some of them are the result of private sector initiatives. The Built Environment Committee has witnessed one such example recently, which is from a firm that began working on town centre redevelopment some 30 years ago. The firm is based in the Sheffield area of South Yorkshire. A typical example of what the firm has achieved has been the redevelopment of an extensive site of a derelict steelworks. This degree of enterprise is rare and it cannot be relied upon to achieve the reconstruction that is called for. Only by engendering the same spirit of enterprise within many local authorities can a major transformation be achieved. It is appropriate to remember that once, in the not-so-distant past, they did embody such a spirit.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House that it is an advisory five minutes.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

It is advisory, presumably, but not mandatory.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

It is advisory, which means you do not need to go to five minutes; you can go shorter than that. Every one of the previous speakers was below five minutes. It is not mandatory but I remind the House that we have speakers who will speak later on this afternoon, when other Members who have already spoken will be at home.