Debate Excerpts: Alexander Stafford vs Jack Brereton

High Street Heritage and Conservation Areas

Debate between Alexander Stafford and Jack Brereton

Wednesday 13th September 2023

(1 year, 3 months ago)

Westminster Hall

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Jack Brereton

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I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and commend the work she has been doing in the town centre to bring some of those buildings back into use; they have such an important role. I know that Stafford faces challenges similar to those faced by many of the high streets across Staffordshire and the country, so I very much commend the work that my hon. Friend has been doing to raise these issues and encourage new usage in Stafford town centre.

We have been working hard in north Staffordshire—in Stoke-on-Trent—to attract Government funding. It is good that levelling-up bids and, indeed, the bids for the restoring your railway fund require the sponsorship of MPs for local projects to win national funding. We often see a bigger picture and are able to raise the hopes and concerns of constituents at a local level more broadly. It seems to me that the bigger picture is what the Office for Place is really all about. The bigger picture I see is that ceramics is not just our past, but our present and our future. Industrial heritage properties give our city a sense of place, but it is manufacturing, of which ceramics is most emblematic, that gives our city its sense of purpose.

It is that sense of purpose that means that our place in the world is more than just a kind of permanent stage, or a film set for a period drama. Of course, it is excellent for those purposes too—from time to time—but we cannot live in a period drama, and particularly not a gritty one. I am sure that the Office for Place gets that and recognises the huge potential of cities like Stoke-on-Trent, which have grown faster economically than other areas in recent times. I hope it shares my excitement that the UK has overtaken France to be the world’s eighth-largest manufacturer. Industrial decline must be left as a fiction for the movies.

The renewed sense of purpose in the manufacturing of our world-class goods is key to levelling up our city, and the sense of pride that we take nationally in our manufacturing base helps to drive that purpose locally. We like the fact that people all over the world still place extra value on ceramic goods that have “made in Stoke-on-Trent” written on them. I emphasise to the Minister that it is important for her to think of her mission as levelling back up, reversing decline and restoring our heritage and skillset to where they belong, which is at the very forefront of international manufacturing, engineering and technology. It is that rooted sense of purpose that built what is now our industrial heritage in the first place.

If the Minister were to walk around the Longton conservation area with me—she is very welcome to do so; I invite her to join me—she would see that that sense of purpose is still there in part, just as our sense of place is still there in part, but that it needs to reach its full potential. In the Potteries tradition, there are fantastic manufacturers of ceramic wares, such as Duchess China 1888, which makes world-class tableware that can be bought in the House of Commons shop, and across the road from that firm we have Mantec Technical Ceramics, which makes an array of advanced, technical and specialist products.

The Minister will know, because I say it often enough, that the gross value added of the ceramic sector has doubled in real terms since 2010. Its revival, and the revival of our wider local economy, is keeping alive heritage buildings that would otherwise be in the same state that the Crown Works is sadly in, following the loss of the famous Tams business, which occupied it until the financial disaster of the last Labour Government saw it close.

The Crown Works is a landmark building that I have been determined to save from gradual dereliction and all-too-frequent arson attacks. I cannot thank the Department, or indeed the Prime Minister, enough for the levelling-up fund. It has enabled me to work with the city council and OVI Homes to get together a scheme to save this heritage asset by repurposing it as retirement housing, which will in turn mean greater footfall and more town centre living. Thankfully, we are now seeing actual delivery at the Crown Works, which is the necessary final step.

As MPs for Stoke-on-Trent, we have frankly busted a gut to secure much-needed funding for a range of schemes across the city. We have had to watch with frustration as covid lockdowns and inflationary pressures delayed so much of what we believed, and were promised, could have been delivered by now. I hope the Government will look carefully at what has been delayed and work with councils— a number of councils, not just ours—to adjust the timeframes for the delivery of projects that sadly could not be met for reasons that were totally out of our control.

I am particularly keen to get the accessibility improvements for Longton railway station finalised and under way. If we look at the visitor numbers for the Gladstone Pottery Museum, and then the numbers of passenger entries and exits at Longton, we see a correlation in the ups and downs. If we look at the visitor surveys, we see causation too, with visitors opting to take the train to Longton and walk up to the museum. Perhaps as much as half the passengers who have used Longton station recently have been visitors to the museum. Preserving the beauty of this cherished asset, even with all its warts—such as the recent saving of its rare sash windows from a bygone age of long-outlawed industrial practices—is integral to Longton’s wider success as a must-see destination and working centre of contemporary manufacture. It is a living destination, steeped in the full narrative of ceramics history.

By preserving our unique industrial heritage, we continue to attract today’s leading international ceramicists—practitioners who could base themselves anywhere in the world—to Stoke-on-Trent, as the authentic world capital of ceramics. However, Stoke-on-Trent, including Longton, is sadly also an area of multiple deprivation, and we had been running up a down escalator just to stay still—never mind advance—even before covid hit. The council tax base is the second lowest in the country after Hull, which poses significant challenges in leveraging restoration funds from the private owners of heritage buildings. Of course, the Government understand that, because they have granted us national funding to help, including funding to reinstate residential accommodation above shops.

The delivery of schemes is now key. The schemes will be sustainable if, alongside wider public realm improvements, they encourage people to use the buildings that are saved on Market Street, Commerce Street, and up to the Gladstone Pottery Museum, for interesting new business and residential uses. Currently, though, the pedestrian journey between the station and the museum is unacceptably poor. Longton station has steps, but not lifts or ramps, and the historic Victorian ticket hall is boarded up—the transforming cities fund is supposed to be unlocking it. Transport is not the Minister’s Department, so I will not rehearse my frustrations with Network Rail and the council with her, except to say that if she wants to see a case study of how delivery has been stymied by covid, by inadequate resourcing and skillsets and by the intransigence of other bodies, she could use Longton station as an example.

The Government are driving levelling up by enabling funding, but they have caught councils and other bodies on the hop because submissions for funding are often reactive to the funds and are not part of an active wider local agenda that is driven by a coherent sense of purpose. I get why that is—the Government want to deliver on national priorities for their own sense of purpose in levelling up—but many councils do not have local schemes that are remotely shovel ready and perhaps bid for funds without really knowing how they will deliver them if something goes wrong. Some councils are not resourced to meet the match funding requirements of some national schemes, and some lack the specialist officers or the time to deliver what is agreed, for whatever reasons.

Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)

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My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point about councils not having the plans in place to move forward. In Rother Valley, for instance, the Land Trust had quite a detailed outline plan in place for Dinnington high street, so when the levelling-up fund went ahead we could bid for it, but other high streets in Rother Valley such as those in Thurcroft, Swallownest and Maltby do not have that outline plan; the council has not done it, which means it cannot bid for the money. Does my hon. Friend agree that councils should have a duty to put together outline plans for all our high streets—heritage and otherwise—to ensure that when pots of money become available, they can secure them?

Jack Brereton

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My hon. Friend makes a good point. We absolutely need that coherence. There are often many different pots of funding, but we need something to bring them together to increase the benefit—[Interruption.]

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High Street Heritage and Conservation Areas

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