Urban Regeneration (England)

Justin Madders Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

Thank you for allowing me to speak today, Mrs Main. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) for securing this debate. She is the Member for the constituency neighbouring mine, so we face a number of similar issues. This is one we definitely share, although, as we will probably hear from other Members, I believe it is also one that a great many town and city centres up and down the country are grappling with at the moment.

As my hon. Friend has mentioned, there have been myriad discussions and debates about the causes of town centre decline, and I do not see any great benefit in rehearsing them. The time has come to find an answer, and I agree with my hon. Friend’s suggestions. There have been attempts in Ellesmere Port, which I represent, to try to regenerate the town centre. We were fortunate, a number of years ago, to have Marks and Spencer invest in the constituency. Despite many efforts on our part as a borough council, we could not persuade it to relocate to the town centre, but it was prepared to invest—in fact, it was its most significant investment in the UK for a number of years—in a large store on the edge of town, in Cheshire Oaks. As many people will know, that is a very popular destination.

Obviously, we were concerned about the impact on the town centre. We were able to agree with Marks and Spencer a generous section 106 contribution for town centre regeneration. Over the past few years, we have been putting that to good use. With that fund a town centre panel was set up, consisting of a number of representatives from the community—from the third sector, local businesses, market traders and the council, including me as I was a local councillor at the time.

The panel is still running today, but the money will run out in the not too distant future. However, it has made some important contributions to keeping the town centre going. A number of events have been put on with the broad aim of getting people into the town centre. We have had concerts and fun runs; there was a big wheel at one point, and a number of Christmas activities. The question we always ask ourselves when we look at how that money should be spent is, “Will this help get people into the town centre?”

Another interesting and innovative use of the money has been on shop front schemes. They have changed the view down the main high street, and people’s perception when they come into the town—they see lots of new shops where before we had empty shops and derelict signs. It is a short-term solution, as those shops still need to be filled. We talked to owners whose units have been empty for a number of years, and put a proposal to them whereby we agreed to use the section 106 money to refurbish their shop fronts and shop units on the basis that they would then let the units to a third-sector organisation on a peppercorn rent for two years. That has brought new life and new initiatives into the town centre, but it is for a limited period, so at the moment we are grappling with the question of where that will take us in the future. It has kept us going in recent times but will not last forever. Some life has been brought into the high street, but the solution is not permanent.

I know a number of towns and cities have been looking at business improvement districts, but in a town such as Ellesmere Port the local traders do not operate on the sort of profit margins that would justify their acceptance into that sort of scheme. We have to accept that a lot of those operations are run on a national basis and it is difficult for a small stall in a smaller town in the country to justify that additional expense. BIDs have had some success, but they are not right for every town. Some of the short-term initiatives have not really been followed through, which is why I agree that we need a fundamental, sustained long-term financial plan and support for town centres.

To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), the civic and community importance of town centres has been undervalued in recent years. Current pressures on the public purse and further anticipated court and library closures mean we are seeing further erosion of the civic facilities that invite people into town centres. We need a new approach. Local authorities have local knowledge and so have the tools at their disposal to try to tackle this issue, but they cannot do that without significant financial support. We know that local authority funding is being squeezed at an unprecedented level. Discretionary spend—essentially, that is what this is—is getting ever more squeezed.

I think that we should be looking at residential units as a possible option, and that some sort of new homes bonus for town centre units that are brought back into residential use should be considered. That would give an incentive to local authorities to try to change some of those empty units.

We should look at the way in which out-of-town centres are managed: they have one person who is responsible for all the functions of the shopping centre. We should have a town centre manager in every neighbourhood. We have had a town centre manager as a result of the section 106 money, which has proved invaluable in bringing together all the different strands that make up a town centre. Ultimately, that can pay for itself if the growth that, hopefully, some innovation generates allows the local authority to keep an increased proportion of the rates. I believe that a co-ordinated approach of that ilk is required.

We should also consider whether to look at enterprise zones for town centres. There is a lot to be said for enterprise zones, but when we are giving people incentives to relocate their new offices, factories and premises out of town centres, we are not doing anything to help those centres. It seems a little perverse that we are all here today extremely concerned about the future of town centres, when a system is in place that encourages businesses to locate outside town centres.

Those are just a few of my suggestions, and I echo what my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Wirral South said: if the Minister is up in our neck of the woods, he is more than welcome to come to Ellesmere Port and have a look at some of the good things we have done and the challenges that we have to face over the next few years. We have made progress, but, as is the theme of this debate, we can only go so far without a significant financial commitment to regenerate these town centres.