High Street Heritage and Conservation Areas

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Wednesday 13th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

It is incredibly good to serve under your chairship, Ms Fovargue. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) for securing this incredibly important debate. Heritage is the soul of a community—a point that we should remember when we build new communities and regenerate existing ones. It is so good to listen to the passion with which hon. Members have spoken about their communities, not least my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who I think is passionate about everything he does, but in particular about heritage in Stoke-on-Trent.

There has been so much to agree on in the debate. I was particularly struck by the support for the ceramics industry: that is pure heritage in Stoke-on-Trent, and it really comes through in Members’ contributions. Indeed, it is not possible to go to dinner anywhere with my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North without him checking the plates, and if they are not made in Stoke-on-Trent he complains to the management of whichever restaurant or hotel we are in. It is that passion which drives the community, but that passion needs to be enabled by action and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South mentioned, the action has been slowed by the pandemic, the inflationary pressures we face and so on. The pandemic stole two years of everybody’s lives. The effect was especially felt here in Whitehall and Westminster, and that has translated down to frustration in our communities.

A huge opportunity remains. I am passionate about levelling up. We are dishing out billions of pounds to breathe life into left-behind communities through the levelling-up fund, the shared prosperity fund, the towns fund and the future high streets fund. Ultimately, levelling up is a cycle of skills and jobs, infrastructure, services and investment—pump priming from the Government, but corporate investment and foreign direct investment as well. All of that combined goes around to people, communities and the places in which we live. That is the lens through which we need to look, and it is where heritage comes in, because levelling up at its very core is about the opportunities that we create for people and that people can create for themselves. We need to reset the way that we look at this investment. It needs to be looked at through the lens of place-making, and that is where we bring in heritage. It is where, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South mentioned, we lack skills in councils and planning authorities. We also lack capacity and—dare I say it—political leadership in councils to look at the bigger picture. We need to look beyond the administrative, bureaucratic and statutory elements of planning and at what an area and a community need. What are the health outcomes we want to address? What are the policing priorities for that area? How do we make a place that is fit for the future, but has the memories and best of our past enhancing our heritage?

We have a huge opportunity. The all-party parliamentary group for ending homelessness recently produced a report on empty properties—on conversions from retail and office space into homes for people. The report identified up to 20,000 units in the possession of local authorities around the country that could be converted. That opportunity directly translates to action that we could be taking at a local level, and that could be supported by action from the Government through not just the high streets fund, the towns fund, the levelling-up fund or so on, but funds such as the heritage fund and various others. We need to put heritage at the heart of place-making, but we need to do it in a way that brings through the passion that we see in our local projects and local politicians.

Members might ask why I am passionate about the subject when I am not from the Black Country—I am literally the odd one out in the debate. It is because I have plenty of heritage in my constituency. I have Olney, which is a beautiful Georgian market town with huge amounts of heritage and listed buildings. Newport Pagnell is, again, a beautiful market town. Tickford bridge in Newport Pagnell is a grade-I listed iron bridge. Wolverton is a wonderful, proud railway town, home of the royal train. We have heritage in all our constituencies that we can pick up and run with when it comes to designing the future. I am incredibly proud that Milton Keynes got £3 million from the shared prosperity fund, which admittedly is not the £50 million that the collective MPs for Stoke-on-Trent got, to regenerate those high streets that I mentioned and to do more to take that heritage through.

There is lots to do, but through the lens of place-making, we can understand and make a tangible difference by bringing the best of the past into our future and designing a vision for our future that works. That vision should take the best out of things such as the community renewal fund and the community ownership fund to help acquire empty properties and to deliver value that reflects our heritage as well. We need to co-ordinate, plan and deliver. We need to breathe beauty into our high streets, understanding our past and embracing our future.