Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Rory Stewart Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

How does my hon. Friend suggest we communicate politically the value of market towns as opposed to cities?

[Martin Vickers]

That is a challenging question. The reality is that we have been trying to revitalise our towns. As I have said, I served for a long time on my local authority. I was also a member of the Local Government Association’s urban commission. We had countless presentations from highly paid consultants on how this could be achieved, but many of the ideas fell flat because there was not the support of local communities.

The report mentions reinvigorating high streets with market traders. In principle, that is fine, but I remember being the councillor responsible for allowing that to happen and there was a mass uprising among existing shopkeepers, who immediately came to me saying, “I pay my rates and my dues and you are allowing these people to drift in, many of whom have no connection with the town and the community.” It is a difficult balance to achieve.

We have to recognise that the success or failure of our high streets and town centres relies ultimately on the customers. It will be determined by the market forces. I want to see our town centres and high streets thrive with imaginative ideas from local shopkeepers, but ultimately the customer is king. Past Times went into administration a day or two ago; we must hope that high streets do not belong to times past.

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

That was a powerful concluding statement from my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who laid out the complexity of the situation.

The truth is that over the past six decades our policy on market towns and high streets has been an astonishing failure. Government after Government have tried almost everything. They have played around with parking and with rates, and they have changed the planning regulations. The result has been a catastrophic disaster. We have gone from 43,000 butchers in 1950 to 10,000 in 2000. We have gone from 41,000 greengrocers to 10,000. The number of fishmongers is now a fifth of what it used to be and the number of bakers is a quarter of what it used to be.

The question is, what do we do? We first need to be tough and serious in recognising the problem. The problem is not simply that out-of-town retailers are large, muscular bullies. First, their growth reflects the fact that it is more convenient to locate a business out of town. It is, of course, cheaper and easier to set up out of town. A shop can have night time deliveries, the rates are much more transparent and it is easier to develop a retail space that suits the retailer. Secondly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes said, customers are selecting out-of-town retailers for their shopping. Thirdly, we need to acknowledge that although out-of-town retailers have had a disastrous impact on our high streets and market towns, they have had a very good impact on the products in our shops. When my neighbour first moved to Penrith in 1955 from the United States, the only way in which one could buy olive oil was to go to the chemist and buy it in a bottle of about 25 ml for medicinal purposes.

So what are we going to do? As everybody has said in this debate, we need clearly to define the value of towns and high streets.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in addition to providing a broader range of products, the supermarkets that he refers to have brought the benefit of reducing the cost of living for many people by reducing the price of basic essentials and the general grocery bill?

[Rory Stewart]

I agree absolutely. That is why the argument that we have to make is not an easy one. We have to make it because everybody in this Chamber—indeed, everyone in this country—believes deeply in the value of our high streets and market towns. It is not an easy argument to make because in terms of price, market competition and, fundamentally, choice, it is difficult to continue to defend the high street. In order to do so, we need to reach for more imaginative arguments.

We need to explain, above all, the value of public space. The great thing about any high street or market town is that it offers somewhere that is different from the workplace and the home: a civic space in which one interacts with other people. The point of it is not simply a shopping or retail experience, but those innumerable miniature encounters and exchanges of advice and wisdom that create the warp and weft of a community. That is a huge capital resource that we rely on when we talk about the big society, when we look for voluntary activity or when we fight for our local assets, such as in Penrith where we are fighting to save our cinema. We need that local identity and it is conveyed primarily in our lives through the experience of a town or high street.

[Mr Marcus Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the ambience and experience of the town centre is extremely important? The town centre manager in Nuneaton has a strong track record of putting on entertainment such as Punch and Judy shows, theatre shows, mini opera companies and brass bands. Does my hon. Friend agree that such things add to the ambience and experience when people go to our town centres?

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. Of course, that is a central insight of this debate: a town centre is not simply about a shopping or retail experience, but about a much broader community experience that can range from puppets to the visual elements and even the aesthetics. One reason that Appleby in my constituency is such an appealing place is its architecture. The extraordinary asymmetry and symmetry of our red sand stone, the castle on the top of the hill, the Moot hall and the market cross create something that it would be impossible to replicate in a modern retail space. Those things are not about shopping.

The other important point from Nuneaton is local leadership, which is what we need to represent a town centre and compete with an incredibly able retail manager at a Tesco or Waitrose. That is why we should look again at local democracy and elected local mayors. If we ask why a French town is vibrant and able to say no to a local supermarket, whereas in Penrith a Sainsbury’s appeared even though I reckon 90% of the community opposed it, we realise that a great deal of that is due to the lack of a local leader and champion, the elected mayor, who can say no.

We can also do an enormous amount to support councils by getting rid of regulations and ensuring that if, for example, Penrith wished to challenge the supermarket, it could be confident in the judicial review process and confident that the planning laws would suit it. There could perhaps even be insurance if it were defeated, so that it did not feel horribly financially exposed.

Finally, and most importantly for Conservative Members, we must understand that this is a fundamentally conservative campaign in the best sense of the word. It is not about a grand vision of central planning and rationality, or a notion that some expert in a capital, or in Tesco’s headquarters, can define exactly what is required for every community. It is about taking what is already there—our historic inheritance. It is often an inconvenient inheritance for parking, rates or the space for shops, but we can make something of that history and tradition. Above all, we can have not simply shopping but a sense of the warp and weft, the interaction and the human spirit of community that once made us proud to be called a nation of shopkeepers, which will be difficult to retain without any shops at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I will turn to empty shops in a moment.

Void rates are another real issue, especially in secondary shopping areas, but the most recent wave of closures and the downsizing and retrenching of the retail sector are clearly causing a problem even in primary shopping areas.

There is a set of challenges for the high street, and that is not to mention the difficulties caused by the rise in internet shopping and by out-of-town centres.

[Rory Stewart]

Does the shadow Minister acknowledge, however, that internet shopping can be immensely beneficial to small, high-street shops? For example, in our constituency, the John Norris fishing supplies shop makes £12 million of sales over the internet but only £1 million through the door—and that allows it to keep going.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I do accept that point, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) made very well earlier. Nevertheless, the internet is, I think, an additional challenge for high streets and town centres.

I say all that not to talk down our high streets, however, because, as several hon. Members have said, the town centre or high street in their constituency is weathering the economic storm. I say it to demonstrate the extent of the problem, because not all town centres are thriving and we have to be clear about the action that needs to be taken.

In government, we had a strong “town centre first” policy, but even with that policy there was recognition that more needed to be done to revitalise high streets, so there is a particular challenge for this Government. They need to do more to bolster consumer confidence, as their austerity programme—cutting too far and too fast—coupled with their VAT hike last January has squeezed incomes, reduced consumer confidence and led to further job losses on the high street. In a YouGov poll last year, four fifths of retailers said that the VAT increase would undermine sales.

The Government have so far also ignored the recommendations for a stronger “town centre first” policy, and they need to think about amending the draft national planning policy framework to reintroduce the sequential tests for town centres, because we really need that to encourage more town centre development.