Land Registry

Debate between Charles Walker and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I thank my hon. Friend, who has made an excellent point. It is very wrong for any employing body not to be prepared to meet a Member of Parliament, who will obviously raise issues on behalf of their constituents.

The Law Society has stated:

“No detailed evidence is provided to explain how any change to the current model could bring about increased efficiencies or effectiveness to an organisation that currently makes a significant profit.”

The Minister needs to provide evidence to support his proposals, and to address the following issues. If the move to more digital services leads to some job cuts through voluntary redundancy, can the Minister assure me that the Land Registry will continue to have a presence in the north-east, particularly in Durham? Can he explain why the delivery of land registration by a company that would permit

“greater flexibilities to operate around pay, recruitment and possibly provide other services”

would make the Land Registry’s business strategy more achievable? Will the taxpayer be getting value for money from the privatisation? I do not trust this Government to get it right, given their appalling track record on undervaluing Royal Mail. What if the same situation arises again?

In addition, there may be long-term costs to the state and users of the service, which could undermine any sale price. If there are going to be new costs or restrictions on what information businesses, individuals and public sector agencies can access in relation to land programmes, how will that be monitored? No details have been provided as to the precise nature of how any of the options might operate, making it, as we have said many times, difficult to assess accurately the extent to which any new model will work better than the existing one.

I finish with one further question to the Minister. The Land Registry in this country—I wonder whether he is aware of this—has been giving advice to many other countries about how to set up land registry services. We are seen as a model of best practice around the world. I implore him to think very carefully before he severely disrupts a model that has been shown to work so well.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

We have time for three more colleagues with about seven minutes each. Mr Bellingham, are you standing?

Retail and the High Street

Debate between Charles Walker and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Thursday 28th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) for securing this debate and pay tribute to their work as joint chairs of the all-party retail group. I pay tribute to all hon. Members who have spoken passionately about their areas. I will return in a moment or two to some specific points that they raised.

The importance of high streets and retail cannot be better demonstrated than in Stockport, where, as my hon. Friend eloquently outlined, retail is a significant part of the economy and contributes a large proportion of jobs in the town. Stockport is benefiting from the reshaping of the town’s retail offer, and in a way it is forging a new identity. That is to be applauded.

I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) mentioned the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers campaign to keep shop workers safe, because we do not talk enough about that in the House and we have to consider it when thinking about regenerating our high streets and town centres.

I am glad that most hon. Members mentioned small business Saturday on 7 December. I am sure that we are all getting behind it and supporting our small businesses. It is worth highlighting.

It is pertinent to discuss the state of our high streets. We have had a number of debates on the subject in the House recently and in the past few years. The issue will not go away, and the reason for that is clear: we are seeing a decline in the variety of businesses that make up our high streets. There are now more than twice as many betting shops in British high streets than all the cinemas, bingo halls, museums, bowling alleys and so on put together, but the situation is not inevitable. Positive interventions can be made, and we should not accept the automatic decline of our high street due to trends of online shopping and so on. We have to make the right interventions, and they must be supported by the Government, who must help the process of diversification that we know is needed.

The facts make concerning reading. At this moment, one in seven of Britain’s shops lie empty, and in some places it is one in three. Given that position, the Government should take action to support the high street, but recent data show us that, in a large number of areas, the high street revolution has failed to take off. Vacancy rates, although improving, are doing so only marginally, with a reduction from 14.2% to 14.1%.

The Government’s approach is fragmented. A number of initiatives have been mentioned. We have Portas pilots, town team partners, the future high streets forum, a high street innovation fund, the high street renewal award, a fund for business improvements districts, local enterprise partnerships, local authorities, neighbourhood plans and neighbourhood business plans. Most commentators are saying that we need a more co-ordinated approach, nationally and locally, to help our high streets.

The Government should consider more closely the advice in the Grimsey report, which in many ways echoes what was set out in the Portas review. As my hon. Friend said, that report seeks comprehensively to address the challenges facing the sector. Grimsey set an objective to repopulate high streets and town centres as community hubs, with more housing, education, arts, entertainment, business and office space, health and leisure provision and, of course, shops. He also suggested setting up a town centre commission for each town, with a defined skills base and structure, to build a 20-year vision for each town. He thought that the Government should, at least, pilot that approach. He also said that we should prepare for a wired town centre and that there should be particular support for our high streets, to enable them to embrace new technology, as my hon. Friend outlined. We are not seeing a specific enough initiative to deal with that issue.

In his foreword to his report, Grimsey said:

“We’ve seen reviews, pilots, future high street forums and more. But none of these initiatives are making much impact and there is a frustrating sense of policy being conducted in the margins. The need to grasp the nettle is bigger than ever.”

He acutely identifies the most serious challenges facing the industry, saying:

“The bigger area of concern, though, is the plight of smaller retailers. Many remain horribly stressed financially with an average rating that hovers perilously above the Company Watch warning area. The same pattern applies in the supply chain. For independent shops, a sector that the Business Secretary has previously acknowledged to be an essential part of a healthy high street, the future looks very uncertain. The fact that our analysis shows 46.6 per cent of all retailers in the UK are in the warning area, and by definition at serious risk of failure, should be a loud wakeup call to ministers”—

and to all of us. He states:

“As a check up on the health of the high street, the prognosis is not good. Over 20,000 businesses are at risk and we can expect more and more business failures”

unless action is taken.

“There are around 40,000 empty shops in the UK, and this has remained”

pretty

“constant over…three years.”

The question must be, what are local government and central Government going to do about that?

Part of the answer, undoubtedly, is to enable change of use for premises. What the Government are doing on change of use, however, is making things worse, not better. We know that the consequence of the Government’s changes, particularly those since May, has been to allow more bookies and payday lenders to set up shop on our high streets. The Government are taking away from local authorities the ability to shape what is happening on their high street and to respond to community demand, yet we know that communities want their local authorities to have more control of high street improvement.

A recent survey by Deloitte shows that 73% of people want customers to have a strong role in shaping the high street, and 47% want local authorities to be able to do that. Only 13% want landlords to be able to shape what happens on the high street, yet that is exactly what we have ended up with under this Government. Because planning permission is no longer required for many changes of use on our high street, our local authorities and communities have no ability to shape what is happening. That is the exact opposite of the approach that the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) suggests, which is that local authorities should have powers to shape what happens on the high street, such as by having more rights to purchase properties compulsorily.

The hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) made an excellent point on local authorities using social value clauses to help, for example, local people set up start-up units—there would be more pop-up shops. That is exactly the set of uses that local authorities might want on their high street, but if it is simply left to the market to say how empty properties will be used or changed, we are not likely to get the sorts of premises that local people want.

What is likely to happen, as I witnessed when I visited Woolwich high street last week, is that in a row of 16 shops, nine will be payday loan companies or bookies. Local people told me that they are very unhappy with the situation. They said that, in the past couple of years, the council had indeed spent money on the town square but that it was being thoroughly undermined by the number of fast food outlets and so on in the area.

The last time I raised that point with the Minister, he went out and said to the media, “This is about Labour trying to say to you that you shouldn’t be able to buy a McDonald’s.” I make it clear that that is not what we are saying; we are saying that people do not want an over-saturation of a particular type of shop on their high street. As the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) said, what we need is diversification on our high street. People are telling us clearly that they want independent retailers and community uses; they do not want to see one type of premises taking over the high street.

I hope the Minister will help us to understand how the Government’s approach will assist with that diversification, because I cannot see that approach operating in practice. In fact, we know from across the country that the opposite is happening. The Government could do more. The Government must urgently address change of use and the relaxation of permitted development, and they must give local authorities and communities real powers to shape their high street. That is urgent, but the Government need to do other things. They must consider the wider economy, too.

A recent report by the Centre for Cities claims that the biggest factor affecting the success or failure of our high street is the overall strength of the town or city centre’s economy, and the slow economic recovery over the past three years has really affected the high street. The Government should be doing more to address business rates, increasing rents and higher energy costs, all of which are particularly affecting small business. Again, small businesses themselves are asking the Government to address those issues urgently.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

I thank the shadow Minister for her perfectly timed speech.