Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Simon Hart Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I know that you will not mind, Mr Deputy Speaker, if we return to Wales for a few moments. I want to deal with the twin issues of rates and planning, particularly as they apply to coastal towns, which depend heavily on tourism, and especially towns that fall under the national parks planning regime, which has a significant bearing on their ability to undertake economic activity.

Let me deal first with rates. Tenby has a population of about 5,000 in winter and about 50,000 in the summer, but the ability to negotiate the rates is extremely limited. As a consequence, in the winter shops close, businesses reduce their output, boards go up in windows and people are laid off. That is avoidable, and I make a plea to the Minister. Taken over a short period, the withdrawal of rate relief, albeit predicted and albeit that businesses know about it, can reach ridiculous heights. For example, in local towns such as Narberth in my constituency, figures have reached as high as about 250%, with the consequence that businesses are winding down, shops are closing and people are being put out of work. I suggest to the UK Government and, indeed, to the Welsh Assembly that there must be a neater way of deploying transitional rate relief and a better way of accounting for the fact that seasonal variations in seaside towns can be absolutely huge. Why not have a system whereby rate relief can be more carefully applied in the lower winter months and made up when cash flow might be better in the more buoyant summer months?

The second issue I want to address is planning in national parks. I know that my friends in the Pembrokeshire Coast national park will be suspicious about what I am about to say. I should like to quote one example from the town of Tenby, where a very viable local estate agent applied to take over high street premises that had previously been an unviable pizza parlour. For some strange reason to do with enhanced national park planning policy, the application was turned down. A boarded-up shop that employs nobody and engages in no economic activity remains in the centre of that important town, whereas the alternative would have been to have the lights on in those premises for 364 days a year with six or seven people working inside. There would have been a sense of life and energy returning to an otherwise dormant part of the street, but the only excuse that the national park planning authority could come up with was that the application was outside “policy”. Surely, in such circumstances the answer is to change the policy.

If we want towns such as Tenby to be regenerated, if we want economic activity and if we want people to be encouraged to go into town in the quieter winter months, organisations such as national park planning authorities have to be flexible. Their policies must reflect today’s economic climate and they must point in the direction of the restoration of prosperity rather than getting too hung up on outdated planning issues. I hope that there are two particular audiences to whom the Minister will address his responses—national park planning authorities, particularly in coastal areas, and the Welsh Assembly Government, who occasionally glance in the right direction when it comes to these issues. However, more often than not, particularly with a Labour Administration, the emphasis has been contrary to the interests of high street regeneration rather than complementary to it.