Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Duncan Hames Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

Until recently, Chippenham council was at the forefront of a community-led plan to realise the potential of its town centre. The efforts were led by Chippenham Vision on behalf of Wiltshire council and were hailed by the chief executive of Action for Market Towns as

“beacons of localism in practice.”

Sadly however, I have to report that that progress has stalled following a council planning committee decision to approve the massive expansion of an edge-of-town Sainsbury’s, which prompted the resignation of the hugely committed Chippenham Vision chair, John Clark. The town has lost—albeit only temporarily, I hope—an impressive advocate.

Such supermarket developments can only be a drain on town centres—in this case not only in Chippenham, but in nearby Corsham too. That is in direct and stark contrast to the Government’s stated intentions. Last month I sought and received the backing of the decentralisation Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), for the “town centres first” policy. He clearly stated that the Government’s commitment to it

“with all the tests that it requires, is firm.”—[Official Report, 5 December 2011; Vol. 537, c. 15.]

The evidence from Chippenham suggests that the Minister’s words are not being heard.

We are not alone in facing the prospect of substantial out-of-town supermarket development. Property consultants CBRE reported last month that over 40 million square feet of new supermarkets are already planned for this year. It appears that “town centres first” simply is not happening out in our constituencies. We must address this in the national planning policy framework. There must also be a robust test in respect of qualifying for the presumption in favour of sustainable development; local councils must not adopt a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to planning policies, as Wiltshire recently did.

That is what we face in Wiltshire’s draft core strategy, which my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), referred to in his speech. It is set to conform to the old unlamented south-west regional spatial strategy. Despite the fact that that never came into legal force, council planners choose to claim that it is necessary for their local plan to conform to it now. Their report to the council’s cabinet this week states:

“Until the full provisions of the Localism Act come into effect through secondary legislation, the Pre-submission Draft Wiltshire Core Strategy needs to be in general conformity with the Regional Spatial Strategy for the South West unless new up-to-date evidence indicates otherwise.”

I had thought that this Government had done something about that, because as far back as July 2010, the decentralisation Minister was good enough to confirm to me on the Floor of the House that he had issued guidance to inspectors saying that they should consider unadopted regional spatial strategies as immaterial. The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) is welcome to intervene on me now to give Wiltshire councillors that guidance, ahead of their imminent decision, and confirm that their officers’ instructions on this matter are simply wrong. If he does not do that now, I hope that he will manage at least to cover the point in his speech.

The future of town centres lies not in rolling them back to the way they were decades ago, or even in maintaining them just the way they are today, but in giving them the freedom to redefine their role according to local strengths and opportunities, and then in ensuring that the public bodies in the local area co-operate with that ambition.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we also need something to shift the balance from edge-of-town and out-of-town retail to town centres? That could be some form of small business relief, which does help to tilt that balance. We have done some of that work in Northern Ireland and I am sure that other parts of the United Kingdom could benefit from tilting that balance, to give small business people and small retailers in town centres a bigger advantage. At the moment, they suffer because out-of-town shopping centres have an unfair advantage.

[Duncan Hames]

We do need to tilt that balance. That has been the thrust of my speech, and I think that the planning system has an opportunity to do that for us.

Melksham, in my constituency, is to benefit from a central community campus hosting a leisure centre, a library and a youth centre. The council’s original intention was to locate the campus out of town, but the decision was reversed as a result of vigorous campaigning by the local community, including local councillor Jon Hubbard, and Melksham Without parish council. Local people are not short of good ideas for the future of the communities that they make their home. One tool that people and their councils can use to help their towns is the bottom-up process established by the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, whereby residents, together with their councils, can put proposals to central Government for action to promote or protect thriving local communities. I note that a quarter of the recommendations in Ms Portas’s review are ideas that have come forward as proposals under that Act. Unfortunately, it would seem the process has been put on hold, and we are still awaiting the regulations that will get things going. They are required by the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Act 2010, and I hope very much that we shall see them soon, so that people and councils will be able to get involved.

As we have heard in this debate, pernicious parking charge hikes, along with people ignoring the “town centre first” policy, the insistence of councils on conforming to the old regional spatial strategies, and edge-of-town, edge-of-bypass development will guarantee that it is easier to move things out to the perimeter than to regenerate town centre locations. Over the longer term, reinvigorating town centres requires innovative ideas about what their future role should be. The future of our market towns should not lie in being dormitories with hollowed-out cores which send commuters out into large cities but have no life of their own. That is not sustainable socially, economically or environmentally. As we have heard, there is no shortage of ideas as to how we can approach this challenge, and Parliament must ensure that the planning system listens to and reflects the ideas of the communities who will have to live with its decisions.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)]

I join virtually every colleague who has spoken in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) on securing the debate—a truly inspired move—and the Backbench Business Committee on ensuring that it happened.

I have had the pleasure of sitting through most of the debate and hearing the many by and large excellent contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the House. I have enjoyed it tremendously in the run-up to the Government’s response to the Portas review. Of course, the debate has very much been spurred by the Mary Portas report, which was undertaken after the Prime Minister personally asked her to go out, look at what was happening in our town centres and high streets and make a series of proposals to make things better. There are 28 proposals in all, many of them quite detailed and many of which Members have touched on.

It has been fascinating to weigh up Members’ representations. As one Member suggested, it has been like an afternoon and evening of sitting through maiden speeches, because every Member mentioned every town and village in their constituency. It made the debate much more enjoyable.

I should, as everyone else seems to have done, declare an interest—one Member declared a disinterest—by saying that 21 years ago last month, I started my own retail shop, a print business, so I have had some experience in retail and found out how tough it can be on the high street. Among the many significant problems that retailers have to overcome can be intransigence from local authorities, which, it has to be said, have until now had almost no interest in business in their area, and particularly in the retail sector. Why? Well, retail businesses do not vote, and the local authority does not get to keep their money. One of the most important reforms, therefore, which Mary Portas mentions in the report, must be the localisation of business rates. I am delighted that that legislation is now going through the House. Speaking as that small shop owner, I know that it will be of considerable help to many people. Alongside that, of course, local authorities will have the ability to provide a discount on business rates if they choose to. The legislation will make that all the more easy.

As I am speaking in this debate, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the wonderful town of Hatfield suffers greatly from the same problems that many Members have described. It was a new town, and so bright was its future when it was set up. Unfortunately, partly because of the situation that has been mentioned—the road and the cars were taken out of the town centre, and the life was sucked out of it—it has struggled to have a renaissance. As the Minister taking the response to the Portas review forward, I can assure right hon. and hon. Members that I have personal experience of a failing town centre that needs to be rescued. That is why I take many of the measures suggested in the review so much to heart.

Car parking was the No. 1 concern mentioned by Members in the 54 contributions. It is absolutely right, and in fact quite obvious, to say that in today’s society, when people either do not need to get into their car at all because they can simply click on something with a mouse to buy it or, if the option is available, as it now is in most parts of the country, drive to a shopping mall or shopping centre, an uncompetitive high street with high parking charges will always make a retail district suffer. It is absolutely essential, even in these incredibly tough times, for local authorities to appreciate that hammering the motorist visiting the local shops will not be the solution to the area’s problems, and certainly not to those of retailers. Everything comes back to the fact that in future, under the localisation of business rates, for the first time it will matter to local councillors that businesses survive and thrive, because the local business rates will be retained.

The second most-mentioned item in the debate was the Mary Portas concept of town teams. That is the idea that if people want to promote their town, they need to get together. That involves not just the usual suspects—the town centre manager and perhaps an interested local councillor—but everyone, from the retailers and landlords to the council, and most notably Members of Parliament, forming a town team and leading the debate. If I am enormously enthused about one thing in the debate, it is that so many Members—it must be said that I am referring mostly to Government Members, who have largely filled the House—spoke with enormous passion and made it clear that they intend to lead the debate in their local areas. That will do an awful lot of good.

Members, and particularly the shadow Minister, mentioned the “town centre first” policy. Government Members would be far more tempted to take lectures on different solutions for the town centre—or whatever this week’s soundbite is from Her Majesty’s Opposition—if Opposition Members actually attended the debate. There were significant periods when but one person—the shadow Secretary of State—sat on the Opposition Benches. I felt so sorry for him—he seemed so lonely—that I was tempted to join him. People in the country and retailers would take Opposition Members’ comments all the more seriously if they were expressed in this House.

Mary Portas has made many different recommendations and the Government have made a number of significant moves, including, for example, doubling the small business rate relief for two and half years to help small businesses through the Localism Act 2011; scrapping Whitehall planning guidance, which forced up parking charges in the past; changing the planning rules to allow councils to provide more parking spaces; and updating the licensing laws to give councils more power to tackle antisocial behaviour and, of course, the problems that came in with the 24-hour drinking laws.

I said that I would respond on the “town centre first” policy. We have focused on retail development in town centres. The national planning policy framework will be released by the spring. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) was quite wrong to say that it does not put town centres first, because it absolutely does. It is very clearly written, so I suggest she looks at the text again. We believe that town centres should be considered very strongly when making decisions. To reinforce that, the 2011 Act and the move towards giving local people the ability to make decisions, which was mentioned by more than one of my hon. Friends, mean that it will be much easier in future for local areas to prioritise in the way that they would wish to ensure that developments happen in the right way.

[Duncan Hames]

My right hon. Friend speaks with enthusiasm about the policies that the Government are introducing, but will he touch on the question I raised on the progress they are making to get rid of the regional spatial strategies and the old planning policies, which were forced on local areas by the previous Government?

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend is right. Nothing did more damage to local areas than those hated regional spatial strategies. As everyone knows, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has already written to local authority leaders and the Planning Inspectorate confirming that we will abolish those regional planning strategies. That letter was immediately material consideration, but we now intend to lay the orders from the 2011 Act, which will mean that they will finally be gone. I can therefore tell my hon. Friend that policies and proposals from the once-emerging regional spatial strategies should carry very little weight indeed in the minds of anybody involved in our planning system today.