Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I was born and brought up in Dudley. Dudley has been somewhat disparaged this evening, but I want to tell colleagues that it used to be the place to go. For me, Cranage’s coffee shop was the place to hang out. For my mum, it was Cook’s or Beattie’s department stores. However, following the closure of a huge local steelworks called Round Oak, Government subsidies were used to create a new shopping centre called Merry Hill on that site—with free car parking, of course. Merry Hill sucked the lifeblood out of Dudley. Cook’s was lost, but Beattie’s stubbornly hung on for many years. It was a family firm determined to buck the trend and keep the town together.

Today, as the MP for Solihull, I have fought, along with my party and local residents, against an Asda superstore being built on precious parkland on our high street—the Stratford road in Shirley. We lost. The Conservative-led council forced the decision through. We are about to find out whether we are right to believe that the Asda will suck the lifeblood out of the small independent shops on the high street, or whether the developers are right in saying that it will attract more people who will magically spill out on to the high street and create more footfall.

Now the Conservatives are planning to introduce car parking charges to Shirley for anything longer than a 30-minute stay. That is crazy. It will mean that the hard-working shopkeepers will be starved of business because people will be unwilling to pay the charges, especially when there is free parking down the road at an out-of-centre Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Councils should be looking for ways of encouraging people to use local shops, not discouraging them from doing so. I have big worries that this will be the last straw for Shirley.

That is what is happening now, but what of the future? Do we have to march inexorably down this road? Are the town centre and the high street doomed? Tonight we have heard many facts about the decline in trade and in the number of high street shops, but I do not think that they are doomed. There will always be a need for town centres. They are not just places to get commodities; they are venues in themselves, incorporating restaurants, entertainment and places to meet up with friends, to socialise, to browse and to be seen. Touchwood, in the centre of Solihull, is an excellent example; it demonstrates how a good shopping centre can thrive.

A recent Experian report identified that frustrations with online shopping are driving consumers back to the high street. Deliveries can be slow or even non-existent, and the goods often do not match the online descriptions. When we go shopping, we can see exactly what we are getting, and have the instant gratification of being able, in most cases, to take our purchases home with us.

The high street must respond to changing consumer expectations and offer a great experience to shoppers. On the whole, business improvement districts have done well in concentrating on that, and they can do more. I have been banging on for years about local communities’ need for empowerment in relation to the design and character of their shopping centres. Developers who come in with a “we know best” attitude could be in for a fight, as was the case in the Shirley development.

I support the Association of Convenience Stores’ sequential test to ensure that all sites close to a town centre are considered before out-of-town developments are allowed. Both the ACS and the Portas review support a presumption in favour of town centre development, and I totally agree we should have a “town centre first” principle in the national planning policy framework.

As for parking charges, out-of-town centres clearly have a competitive advantage, and I support the idea of councils being given new tools to raise revenue specifically to support access to, and the regeneration of, high streets. Given that business rates can now be repatriated to local authorities, I am sure that a way can be found for that to be done. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and we must find a way to even up the playing field so that all retailers have a fair chance to get a fair market share.