Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Debate between Meg Hillier and Grant Shapps

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Meg Hillier]

I hope the Minister gets to the betting shops issue, which is not a party political one—I lobbied the previous Labour Government on it. Will he answer the question asked in the debate? Will the Government give fair wind this Friday to the private Member’s Bill promoted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), which would radically change our high streets?

[Grant Shapps]

There were many detailed recommendations in the report, and I am looking with great interest at the one on betting shops. I sense the impatience that has been expressed today for a response to Mary Portas’s recommendations, and I can assure hon. Members that they will not have to wait terribly long to find out what our response will be. We have promised to deliver it by the spring, and we absolutely intend to do so; the hon. Lady will not have to wait very long at all—and I can confirm that I mean spring 2012.

We intend to provide a very energetic response to the Portas review. The Government like what she has said, and we have already started to implement a number of her recommendations. I will be coming back to give greater detail on the other items that we have not so far covered, but we have a generally positive attitude towards the report. It is also true to say, however, that in order for her recommendations to work, it would not be sufficient for us simply to put in place all 28 of them. Hon. Members and others should not expect a universal recovery in the high street simply as a result of such action. Retail is much more complex than that, and we need to get to the heart of the reasons that it has suffered so badly.

Hon. Members mentioned the fact that there are two essential factors. The first is the growth of the internet, as recognised by Mary Portas. The second is the growth of the out-of-town shopping stores; again, the report recognises that factor. Both those factors are here to stay, no matter what we do. No one can legislate to get rid of the internet, or to do away with the out-of-town stores. The advantages of the existing high streets therefore need to be played up. The first is the ability of people shopping in the high street to touch and feel products does not exist when they are shopping online, although they could still do that in an out-of-town store.

The second advantage is perhaps more significant. It is the ability to meet, communicate and enjoy a coffee with friends, and to go to other facilities that are based in the same location. Such facilities could include a local library or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton said, a theatre. The high street provides a sense of community and well-being that I will wager could never be provided by the out-of-town stores. They simply do not provide that sense of community and belonging that has been so vividly described by Members across the House today. I have visited many of their constituencies in my role as Housing Minister, and I look forward to visiting many of them again. We have been given a wonderful tour of the country today, and we look forward to seeing those high streets revived. The one pledge that will go out from the Government is that, in addition to implementing as much of the Mary Portas review as possible, we will ask Members from across the House to lead the debate and the renaissance in their constituencies in the months to come just as passionately as they have done in the Chamber today.