Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris). I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) on securing this debate.

I have the pleasure of representing a seat with three town centres, Alfreton, Heanor and Ripley, and there are various other high streets. I could go on all night and list them, but probably the three biggest are Codnor, Somercotes and Langley Mill. It will not surprise anyone who has heard the debate to hear that they all face the challenge, to varying degrees, of empty shops and an over-supply of charity shops, take-aways and betting shops. This seems to be true of the whole country.

I was slightly concerned by the local council’s report on the retail industry in Amber Valley. I first read the part about the most successful town in the constituency, Alfreton, which shows that in some parts footfall is below the national average. I thought, “That’s a bit of a problem, but hopefully we can find a way to fix it.” I then read the part about the weakest of the three towns, Heanor, which shows that footfall there is one third of that in Alfreton, which already has a problem. That shows the scale of the problem we face in that part of Derbyshire. Because of the history of old mining communities, there are many small town centres between one and five miles apart servicing 20,000 people, and the old diverse shopping mix, with people walking into town to use the shops, is history. That is no longer how we shop.

Before we look back to a golden age of town-centre shopping, we should think about what we do when we get back home on a Thursday evening at half-past 9 after leaving this place and find that there is no food in the fridge. We go down to the 24-hour Asda and do our shopping there. I am then busy all day Friday. What do I do at the weekend? I go to the supermarket. Those of us who know that that is wrong try to find the time to shop in local shops, for example by going to a local butcher rather than the supermarket. I have found that one of the privileges of being an MP is that I get to convince my girlfriend that we cannot go to the Meadowhall shopping centre, but we have to shop locally instead. According to the Portas review those huge shopping centres offer a great and enjoyable experience, but I am not sure that that is what I have found.

Understanding the problem is easy, but finding the fix is not. I do not think that the fix is for my local council to have to decide tomorrow night whether it wants to sell land on the edge of Ripley to another supermarket. I do not know who is bidding or how many bidders there are, but I do know that having a second supermarket will not help in a small town that is already struggling. The shopping centre might have a pharmacy, an optician, a mobile phone shop, an electrician —you name it, they have it these days—and the town centre already has vacant shops. It has three pharmacies, an optician, a Currys and other electrical shops, all of which will be under direct threat from a second supermarket, never mind the fact that there are already two supermarkets in the town centre that are themselves struggling.

We have to send out the message that if we are trying to save our town centres, we cannot add extra out-of-town shopping that reduces the footfall that town centres desperately need to attract. The council’s report states that we might need another supermarket in the Alfreton area in 2026. I look forward to catching HS2 to that supermarket in 16 years’ time, but in the meantime I am not convinced that we need it.

It would be remiss of me not to comment on parking, which is a long-running local issue. Our parking charges are actually quite low: 50p an hour is a typical rate. With the amount the petrol costs to get to the car park, I wonder why those charges are such a concern, but clearly they are, especially for the convenience store that has reopened in Heanor market place—I pay a huge tribute to Mr Patel for that. His problem is that there is a Tesco store down the road. If I want to buy a pint of milk I can park there for free, but if I want to buy it at his shop I have to find the change, find the machine and pay the 50p, and if I accidentally stay longer I get the privilege of a £25 fine. Finding a solution to that problem is key.

The most encouraging thing about Mary Portas’s review is that she did not try to take us back to the golden age of the 1950s or claim that this is just about getting all the shops back. She recognised that we have to do something different, and find different uses to get people using town centres again, whether that is a social use, a health use or something else. The challenge for all of us, and for our councils, is to find something that will work for each town centre, and find a way of making it happen. If that means shrinking the shopping area and moving shops to a viable area, rather than having them too spread out, or if that means finding other uses and allowing empty shops to become restaurants or café bars to try to get that footfall and find a viable use, that is the way forward, and that is what we need to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

I shall take a slightly less supportive position on the Portas report than my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who just made a very effective contribution to the debate.

I recognise that our local communities want to retain their high streets and town centres, and ultimately it is in their hands: they will determine where they shop. My hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) pointed out the attractions of supermarkets because of their all-embracing services at almost every hour of the day and night, but we certainly have to do something to restrict out-of-town developments and to retain the vibrancy of our town centres, because that is what the people we represent most certainly want.

My constituency boasts in Barton-upon-Humber a very good market town, and in Cleethorpes itself the main shopping centre on St Peter’s avenue boasts not only the MP’s constituency office, but a lively and excellent selection of shops. Another town in my constituency, Immingham, has a reasonable mix of shops, but it, like other places, is desperate. It wants Tesco as part of its regeneration, and I am pleased to say that it is almost about to happen, but we have to recognise that point.

I do not have time to touch on all the recommendations in the Portas report, so we can take it as read that I support most of them, but the town team recommendation envisages

“a visionary, strategic and strong operational management team”

and, having served on a town team as a council representative for many years, I have to say that we struggled because of over-regulation, difficulty and the lack of funding—even at that time, with lavish support from the regional development agency, which achieved almost nothing. Town teams are fine, but nothing will happen without the driving force of a local authority, because it controls planning, traffic movement and car parking.

Much has been said of car parking. Of course, we would all love to see zero charges, but the reality is that car parking provides a net income. I wrestled with this matter when I was a member of my local authority’s cabinet, where car parking had a net income of £1.25 million. Yes, that can be reduced. North Lincolnshire council, which is another authority in my constituency, has brought in some imaginative ideas and encouraged growth.

[Nigel Mills]

Does my hon. Friend agree that when councils get the power to keep any increase in their local business rates, we will soon see whether they are convinced that by reducing parking charges, they can generate extra business rates and therefore extra revenue? Cutting car parking charges might not be a lose-lose game, but rather a win-win game.

[Martin Vickers]

My hon. Friend has made the point that I was just coming to, so I will skip a few points. However, we have to recognise the difficulties that local authorities face in this regard.

Recommendation 15 of the report talks about an “affordable shops” quota in large new developments. That idea sounds fine, but the businesses that would be drawn to such developments are probably those that are currently in secondary shopping areas, such as the long parades of shops that most towns have, where many of the shops are boarded up or are used as charity shops. The recommendation might lead to more decay and dereliction in those secondary areas. We must consider the knock-on effects.

Overall, the report is to be welcomed, if for no other reason than that it has generated a lively debate in the House today, with excellent contributions. That will feed through into our local communities, where the debate will continue.

While I have the opportunity, I will put one point to the Minister again. We hear much about the regeneration of our cities, which are indeed engines of economic growth. I ask him not to forget the provincial towns, many of which are a long way from a major city. There should not be too much concentration on cities at the expense of the many provincial towns in my region, such as Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Halifax and Huddersfield.