Retail and the High Street

Martin Vickers Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I join others in congratulating my colleagues, the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), on securing this timely debate.

We do not need surveys or focus groups to establish that high streets are popular with our constituents, whose natural instincts support a thriving high street. I suspect that is even more true in some of our smaller market towns. High streets in towns such as Barton-upon-Humber in my constituency, which has a good mix of independent shops, are certainly highly valued by local people. I am pleased to say that Cleethorpes itself has a thriving shopping area, in the appropriately named High street and down St Peter’s avenue, with a good mix of shops that is well valued by the local community.

As has already been suggested, the retail environment is changing dramatically. Too many attempts are made to preserve the high street scene and ignore the fact that shopping habits have changed due to the internet and what almost amounts in some cases to the migration of the town centre to a different location on the edge of town or urban retail parks. We have all witnessed what starts simply as an edge-of-town supermarket expand until a cluster of other retail units form around it; in a short space of time, we have a competing town centre or high street. Whether or not those changes are for the better, we cannot alter the fact that the customer has decided that they are here to stay.

The Portas review was established and, as I stated in previous debates, I see little in it that does anything more than apply a sticking plaster to a gaping wound. I do not blame the Government for using a celebrity to front the review. Sometimes celebrities can draw more attention to issues than any politician or businessman can. To be fair to Mary Portas, her report recognises that retailers need fewer shops and recognises the onward march of the supermarkets, which is of course the main reason why we need fewer retail units. She is half right when she states:

“We have sacrificed communities for convenience.”

I suggest that in most cases the communities are still there, but they shop elsewhere. I look back to my early childhood in Fuller street in Cleethorpes. It still exists and the same 80 or 90 houses are still occupied, but Mr Marrows, the grocer down the street, and Mr Nocton, the butcher round the corner, along with the baker, the hardware shop and many others, have long disappeared.

Like every town in the country, Cleethorpes simply has too many retail units. Nocton’s butchers stood on Grimsby road, which is the main road between Grimsby and the adjoining town of Cleethorpes. It is also the main entrance to the resort of Cleethorpes, and the many bricked-up, derelict properties do not enhance the reputation of what I am pleased to say is still a thriving resort. Property values and rents are low. Many sole traders are surviving without necessarily thriving. Whether the property owners are the traders themselves, a local landlord or indeed an absentee landlord, an incentive is needed to convert many of the now empty retail units to residential use. With the powers granted to local authorities by the Government’s localism agenda, councils have sufficient powers in their armouries to embark on regeneration schemes. The reality is that very little is happening. Parades of shops up and down the land scar the communities they once served. We must quickly embark on schemes that can revitalise such areas.

In the North East Lincolnshire council area, which is one of the councils that serves my constituency, schemes to renovate empty houses already exist, but they only scratch the surface. This Government and previous Governments have poured many millions into various initiatives that, as I said earlier, only apply an Elastoplast to a wound. We need initiatives that perhaps allow local authorities to spend that sort of money on compulsory purchase, rather than repave vast areas or patch up one little area. I have served on a local authority, so I know how difficult compulsory purchase is to achieve. It often takes two, three or more years to accomplish for a relatively small group of properties, and we need to make it easier. The resources spent on various initiatives would be better spent on buying up properties. Councils could then sell them at a knock-down price—perhaps even give them away—with a compulsory brief that whoever purchased them had to convert them or use them for a particular scheme.

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

The hon. Gentleman is making a number of important points about the powers local authorities have to shape their areas. Does he accept that recent Government changes deregulating permitted development make it much more difficult for local authorities to influence what happens on the high street?

[Martin Vickers]

I am afraid that I do not agree with the hon. Lady. I am very much one for freeing up the ability of councils to put together plans, schemes and initiatives of the sort I mentioned, which, although they may need central funding to kick-start them, are bottom-up schemes. I cannot agree with her.

Much is made of car parking charges. I agree that in an ideal world we would not have them—my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) will refer to the successful schemes that North East Lincolnshire council has introduced—but getting rid of charges is not a panacea. I recall mentioning in a similar debate that I was the councillor on North East Lincolnshire council responsible for environmental services, including car parking. We discussed it time and time again and had various initiatives to help with Christmas shopping and the like, but the reality is that we got £1.25 million in income from car parking charges. If a council is providing services elsewhere, it simply cannot at a stroke say, “We’ll do away with that £1 million.” It is a problem.

Grimsby town centre, the main shopping centre that serves my constituency, has a successful and thriving shopping centre, Freshney Place, which charges. People go there in their thousands, often at the expense of going to other areas that do not charge. If the offer is right, people do not mind paying a modest amount for parking. I can see that I have just exceeded my eight minutes, so I will conclude there and hand over.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

I intend to call the wind-ups at six minutes past four and give each of the Front Benchers 11 minutes. Ms Coffey can have two minutes at the end.