The High Street

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Westminster Hall

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

Thank you, Mr Davies, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) on securing this debate. The fact that it is timely, necessary and topical is evidenced by the number of Members who are here in Westminster Hall today. I also thank him for his excellent contribution to the debate, which clearly pointed out the lack of appropriate action being taken by the Government to regenerate our high streets.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) for raising the issue of payday loan companies, which is an issue I will return to later, and my hon. Friend for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) for reminding us that the retail sector is very important as an employment base in our constituencies and for offering opportunities to young people. I must also say to him that, having heard his contribution, I now feel I know the members of his town team personally; I hope they appreciate that.

At one point, I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) and the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) were trying to outdo each other in arguing about which place was the best to visit—Hackney or Hexham—and in particular where the best market was. I have noted their comments for future shopping trips.

Of course, other Members pointed to the need to have greater differentiation on our high streets and to the need to invest in public spaces, and we heard lots of other ideas about how to improve the high street. There were also lots of invitations for the Minister, which I hope he is grateful for.

At the outset, I will say that I do not particularly want to criticise Mary Portas and the approach she has taken. She and the Government were right to flag the challenges that our high streets face from the recession, online trading and out-of-town centres. It was right that we had a focus on the high street and I do not blame Mary Portas for being a celebrity or for wanting to make a TV show. However, I am critical of the Government for not taking this issue seriously enough and for not having an approach to the high street that is capable of meeting the challenges that Mary Portas identified.

I feel a bit sorry for the Minister who is here today—the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles)—because of course he is not the Minister who was responsible for setting the Government’s approach. The Minister who was responsible is the Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), who has been mysteriously quiet on this issue, which is not at all like him. Of course, he is not here today to answer for the lack of action, but the Minister who is here will know that there is much criticism of the Government’s approach.

Retail expert Paul Turner-Mitchell put it perfectly when he said it is

“wrong to call the winning bids Portas pilots when most town teams were left to their own devices to try and turn things round. The problems on the high street are deeply entrenched and they need serious attention, not an off-the-shelf reality TV approach”.

Indeed, we know that only seven of the current round of Portas pilots have spent any money and that in total—across all 27 town teams—only 12% of the budget has been spent. That points to something going seriously wrong with the Government’s approach and we are entitled to ask what they will do to address the more “entrenched” issues.

The fact is that the Government have seriously let down the Portas pilots, and although those pilots may make good TV the communities that submitted winning bids have not received the support they were promised. Even more seriously, the Government have let down the rest of the country’s high streets and town centres. More than 400 towns competed to become Portas pilots. At the time the pilots were announced, the Minister without Portfolio said that the other areas could learn from their example, but that seems scant consolation now. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) pointed out, perhaps the Government should consider how to make the money that has been put into the Portas pilots go further if it is not being spent by the areas that have already been successful. My question to the Minister is this: what is being done to help the many towns and areas up and down the country that simply do not have any means at their disposal to help them turn their high street around?

We know that this problem is very serious, with as many as one in three shops closed in some areas and 14.2% of shops closed in the country as a whole. Surely it is time for the Government to focus on real policies to support our high streets, rather than on helping to make reality TV shows.

Perhaps that was what was in the Government’s mind last week when they announced changes to use class orders. Members could be forgiven for not noticing that announcement, because this huge change to our policy for the high street was sneaked out in a written ministerial statement, accompanied by regulations that the Government are currently proposing to put through by use of the negative procedure. However, what these changes to use classes could do is to allow virtually any class of commercial premises on our high streets to become any type of shop, fast food restaurant or shop in the euphemistically called “financial and professional services” sector, which, alongside banks and estate agents, includes payday lenders or legal loan sharks and betting shops.

Given that this is an area that the Minister who is here today has responsibility for, I hope he can tell us what was going through his mind when he decided that what struggling high streets need is to make it easier to have more bookies and more payday loan companies sprawl across them. I would like to hear the rationale for that decision today.

Nationally, there are now 20% more payday loan shops and 3.3% more betting shops than there were a year ago, and I do not think there is a huge clamour out there in any of our communities to have any more of those shops; we want fewer of them. They are taking the place of independent retailers, clothes shops and health food shops. There are now more than twice as many betting shops on British high streets as all the cinemas, bingo halls, museums, bowling alleys, arcades, galleries and snooker halls combined. I am sure that the owners of the payday loan companies were jumping for joy when they learned that this year they could accelerate the growth of their businesses without even having to ask permission for a change of use of the buildings they intend to occupy.

That policy is so disastrous that I am not at all sure who the Government think it will help. It certainly will not help independent start-ups, which are hampered—as we know—by the lack of available credit. Somewhat belatedly, the Chancellor seems to have recognised that, in that he has set up a new fund to support small and medium-sized businesses to gain access to credit. However, we also know that the current use class system allows a change of use for a premises in the A class from another type of use to use as a shop. So there are already ample opportunities for empty shops to be used in other ways, or for pop-up shops to be created in empty buildings. The Government should be encouraging that process, rather than the creation of yet more payday loan companies.

Indeed, in that regard it is Labour that is being really localist, because the Minister has effectively, for a period of two years, deregulated use classes on the high street. We want to give local authorities real powers to be able to decide what use classes there are and how they operate on the high street, and to give all our communities a real say in shaping their high street, differentiating it and making it something that local people can be proud of. I want to hear why the Minister has taken the route he has.