City and Town Centres: Regeneration

Debate between Amanda Martin and Vikki Slade

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers, and to represent the Liberal Democrats for the first time as a Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson. The regeneration of towns and cities is an intensely local matter, and it must be approached from a local perspective. Telling people what will fix their towns is the best way to fail. Cities and towns evolved over many decades, and the vestiges of every generation serve as a reminder of what once was, and local authorities need to balance the need to retain the heritage of a place with having an eye to the future.

Toxic nostalgia about how places were when we were young can be a dangerous inhibitor to regeneration. “When we were young” is subjective. For example, the department stores that sorted out our parents’ wedding lists, immortalised by Mrs Slocombe and Captain Peacock, belied the slum conditions and heavy pollution in the cities right outside those stores, and the Woolworths and Blockbuster Videos on the high streets of my childhood are remembered much more fondly than the massive dole queues on those very same high streets. We also forget how the infamous pick ’n’ mix counter destroyed so many independent sweet shops.

City centres have always changed over time, and if we want to avoid another decade of decline after the shocks of Brexit and covid, we need the Government to invest, and to hand the resources and responsibilities to councils and communities. We also need to make sure, as previously mentioned, that our towns and cities give visitors an experience. Shopping will still be part of that, but rarely do people go to the city for just shopping; it is now for eating, playing, meeting, working or living, and we need to make sure that high streets are not just about retail any more.

The Government need to help businesses become more efficient and make the most of technology, but also to provide people with the skills to adapt to their second or third careers. That could be through better use of the apprenticeship levy and supporting both further education colleges and specialist skills providers in offering more bespoke and more agile courses, particularly for people for whom traditional education has failed. One example is Mike Taylor Education in my constituency, which offers high-quality barbering courses from a high street location and supports other thriving businesses with their future workforce.

Liberal Democrats want to see the various pots of money, such as the future high streets fund and the towns fund rolled into a single pot, like with the shared prosperity fund, and we want to avoid the cliff edge that we are expecting in March 2025, so that councils know where they stand for at least another year while a longer term funding cycle is developed. We must learn lessons from the past: under a previous Conservative Administration, Bournemouth’s council approved an out-of-town shopping centre, which led to a mass exodus of most of the corporates from the town centre.

[Amanda Martin]

Does the hon. Lady agree that we need some focused solutions? She has talked about holistic approaches, about the changes in our high streets and about how we need them for communities. That could be for new GP surgeries, for nurseries—whether private or local authority—for pop-up markets, which we have heard about, for art studios, or for facilities that we need, such as baby changing and public toilets. Does the hon. Lady agree that, in order to do that, we need to reform business rates and ensure our local authorities’ planning departments have the capacity to look at those changes? Does she agree that we need cross-Government working, including with the Home Office to make our streets safe, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to support local authorities and update planning systems—