Future of Town Centres and High Streets

George Eustice Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), on securing this very important debate. In my constituency, all three towns—Camborne, Redruth and Hayle—have faced challenges on the high street and, two years ago, before the last general election, I organised a local conference to discuss some of the issues. Conscious that such events are often attended primarily by councillors and local government officials, I walked through all the town centres and went into every single retail shop to discuss their concerns.

Let me outline the three key areas that repeatedly came up. The first was that the term “town centre regeneration” had very negative connotations for a large number of small retailers. The reason for that was alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) earlier, and it is the disruption that regeneration can cause, of which local authorities often do not take enough account, whether the regeneration involves pedestrianisation or the introduction of one-way systems. In Redruth, for example, the local authority was going to resurface the main car park in the town, but to keep down costs it decided to do so progressively in between other jobs. As a result, it took six months to sort out the main car park in the town, which had a hugely detrimental effect on footfall and trade. The town has struggled to recover. First, we must apply the precautionary principle of “do no harm” if an authority is going to embark on regeneration.

The second major issue to come up was car parking. I disagree with what the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) said earlier: most small retailers recognise that the single biggest reason why they cannot compete with supermarkets is that supermarkets can offer free car parking. I always remember the managing director of one of our large retailers saying that if a survey is conducted of the public, they will say that they want a picture postcard high street with a fishmonger and a butcher, but when it comes to how they vote with their wallets, 97% do their grocery shopping at a supermarket because they want to open the boot, load everything in and go home. We need to consider the issue of parking and I want to see local authorities using their retained business rates to try to offer some free car parking.

The third issue was business rates. It is a crying shame to see small retailers with new businesses that have sometimes been set up for only six months—who take huge pride in their shops and did not need mentoring by other retail experts or training as they knew what they were doing—find that the rigidities of the business rate system means they go backwards, losing money month after month, which is not sustainable. I think we need to look at ways of making our business rate system more flexible so that we can give more breaks to new businesses that are doing a good job and that, given the time, could achieve so much more.

Much has been said about the report by Mary Portas. I want to pick up on an issue that was touched on by my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) regarding recommendation 20 about the problems caused by banks. I disagree with his comment that we should not pick on banks. I think we should, because the issue is not about the banking estate and their high street branches, but about properties that they have repossessed, often in a trigger-happy way. We need to look at ways of making it harder for banks to repossess businesses, perhaps by requiring them to get a possession order from the courts before being granted possession of those businesses. That would give the courts the ability to take into account any proposals that banks or receivers have to bring those businesses or shops back into use quickly.

The final issue I want to address concerns the Local Government Finance Bill, which will commence its Committee stage tomorrow. The Bill provides that in the hierarchy of liabilities, a mortgagee who takes possession of a residential property will become liable for the council tax. That is a very important policy, which we should consider extending to business rates on commercial properties. This is a grey area at the moment, but I understand that as a general rule once banks have crystallised their charge on a property and taken possession, they are no longer liable to pay the business rates on it. If we made them pay those business rates, it would create an incentive for them to rent out such properties or, indeed, not to foreclose on businesses in the first place. No doubt the Minister will take some of these suggestions on board and we might consider some of this in Committee.