Retail Sector

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Kevin Foster

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

It is a delight to speak in this debate. Ironically, if I was not here, I would be back in Torbay, helping to present the “Love Your High Street” awards. One recipient was the Kind Grind in Lucius Street in Torquay and another was a bar called Peaky Blinders in Winner Street in Paignton; both areas are famous for independent shops. This is a welcome opportunity to debate retail, particularly given its importance for many communities up and down the country. Given some of the campaign leaflets that I see in my constituency, it is rather odd that no Liberal Democrat Members were present for the first two hours of the debate, but I shall move on.

Let me start with our town centres, and particularly the internet’s impact on them. No one is going to be able to roll back the digital tide. Most of us have in our pockets a phone with which we could order the entire contents of a department store, a do-it-yourself store and a supermarket literally while we are sat here, if we so wished. The internet has also brought services and products into areas that in the past would have found it difficult to access them. That does, though, present a challenge to our high streets. There is no longer a need to go to the town centre and in future people will mostly go there out of choice, particularly as technology becomes more and more simple. We can heckle and make party political points, but that will not affect the change. It is therefore even more important that we look into what we can do not only to make town centres attractive places for those who still depend on them for their goods, but places to which people would go out of choice to go into a local shop and have an experience.

One thing that came out of the Tesco burger scandal was that a lot of people reconnected with the desire to know where their food comes from and what it is. A lot of local butchers had a boost that they had not had for a long time as people realised that there was something about going to a shop and speaking to a local business that could tell them almost from which cow the joint or product they were buying came.

There is a real need to look into what we can do to shape town centres as places. Rates can be a double-edged sword. They clearly have impacts on businesses, and there is a debate for the long run about how sustainable the existing business-rates model is, given that it is based on an era in which that corner on the high street was the best place to be—hence the location of a lot of Victorian buildings that became banks—and a crinkly shed on the edge of town was not very profitable at all—

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Kevin Foster]

No, I will not, because the hon. Lady was not present for almost the first two hours of the debate.

The business rates system is now not all that appropriate, even though it was appropriate for the shopping patterns of the 1950s. Of course, if we look at it the other way around, by retaining business rates and taking the growth in them, councils can fund exactly the kind of regeneration that is needed in our town centres. So there is a double-edged sword for local authorities in respect of how business rates can be used in future. The existing structure is certainly not all there.

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) about the need to tackle long-term derelict properties in town centres. I think particularly of one in Paignton called Crossways, which is a pretty poor example of a 1960s shopping centre. It keeps going only because of the car park there, the mobile masts on top of it and a lease that was particularly badly negotiated by one retailer, which is still paying even though it shut its shop in the centre some years ago.

The problem with the existing compulsory purchase rules is that yes, in theory a council can get hold of a property like that to push forward regeneration, but the rules are cumbersome. I fully accept that there needs to be protection for people’s private property, particularly their homes, but if commercial properties—no one’s home—have been empty for many years, there comes a point at which it would make sense to make it much simpler for councils to compulsorily purchase properties in order to deal with eyesores. That simplification could be subject to protections based on how long a property has been empty, rather than on values and costs. Some owners almost rely on the fact that their property is such an eyesore that one day someone—I am thinking particularly the taxpayer—might pay a significant amount to have it dealt with.

It is right that local authorities play their part. Torbay Council is starting to look at the future of planning for our town centres, particularly in respect of Torquay, where there is a debate about its size and what we can do to revitalise it by bringing in residences and expanding student accommodation, particularly around the language colleges. That could bring a second wave of life to the town centre. We also need to deal with older, poor-quality office accommodation which, if replaced by new accommodation, could bring jobs and employment back into the town centre and provide the stimulus of people who work in the town centre then shopping, eating and drinking in the town centre after work or on their lunch break.

There is a positive story to be told about the future of our town centres, but they will be very different from what we have seen in the past. People will not use them out of necessity, so they will need to be encouraged to use them out of choice. There will still need to be essential services, such as local post offices and a network of local banks, but we need to be conscious that just standing in the way of technological progress is a strategy that will be as successful as it was for the Luddites who tried to argue against industrialisation 200 years ago. The Government can make a difference through their business rate policy, by giving local authorities more powers and by making it clear that there is still a retail success story in the future.