Cultural and Community Distribution Deregulation Bill [HL]

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Friday 5th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross]

I applaud the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for introducing the Bill and for bringing this issue to the attention of the House in a number of Questions for Short Debate.

It seems to me that there is a really pressing need to amend the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 to regenerate our town centres. We have all seen the headlines and know from our own experience the dire state of our town centres across the country. As the Government in their policy document setting up the Portas pilot regeneration schemes, point out,

“our high streets and town centres are facing serious challenges from out-of-town shopping centres”.

The document goes on to offer a way forward for the high streets. It says:

“They need to offer an experience that goes beyond retail—the high street should be a destination for socialising”,

and culture—a sentiment expressed by my noble friend Lord Clancarty.

It seems strange that just as the Government are spending taxpayers’ money to create this buzz, local councils across the country are thwarting their work by strictly controlling leafleting advertising cultural events in city centres. According to the Manifesto report, mentioned by the two previous speakers, councils are regulating spaces where you can leaflet and levying a variety of charges. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, in some cases licences are extremely expensive and fines for breaking the code can be up to £2,500, which, frankly, would break a small venue. Of course, local authorities want to stop litter and need to charge a small sum from distributors to pay for leaflets to be cleared up and for the scheme to be administered. However, too many councils charge exorbitant fees to license leafleting.

I should like to draw the attention of your Lordships’ House to a particularly blighted town, the centre of which is going through a hard time, part of which I believe is due to the council’s policy on leafleting. Wolverhampton is one of the town centres highlighted in the Department for Communities and Local Government document as being in need of special attention from the television retail guru Mary Portas, who has chosen it as one of the initial 12 town centres to benefit from her help. I am very glad that she has done so as the city centre is in crisis. Thirty years ago it was prosperous, but now one in four retail shops are empty and some streets look like scenes from a post-apocalypse movie. Much of the damage was done several years ago when compulsory purchase orders were put on a third of the town centre commercial properties to make way for a £300 million shopping centre. Guess what happened. Of course, the shopping centre was never built and the properties were all blighted. Now there is not much shopping and no shopping mall. Since then, the council has made strenuous attempts to improve the situation. It has one of the fastest turnaround times for planning applications and has announced a big regeneration scheme for the town centre. However, as I have already pointed out, many councils charge high prices for leaflet distribution licences—much higher than the cost of clearing up the litter. By doing so, I am sure they hope to raise revenue from the scheme. However, Wolverhampton has one of the most expensive leaflet distribution licences in the country. It used to cost £250 per person. However—I would like to correct the noble Lord—it has gone up to £300 per person for a year and a one-off licence for one person for one evening costs £50. Frankly, that is an absurd cost for a small venue which may want to dish out only about 150 leaflets as that is all it can afford, and yet that is the cost of the licence. This seems to be having a deleterious effect on the city’s cultural venues and places for socialising.

I spoke to Steve Harrington, the owner of the Fixxion warehouse project, an arts, film and music venue in the town centre. Apparently, he advises bands coming to play at his venue not even to try to hand out leaflets. The cost of the licence is far too high and if they try to do so without a licence, the council is extremely zealous in prosecuting offenders and usually ends up fining the venue owners as they are the easiest ones to get to. Mr Harrington explained to me that you must do all you can to promote your event and advertise it but Facebook has limited value. To get through to the people who might come to the venue, you have to leaflet them face to face. He used to do that by going to nearby venues, finding queues of would-be customers who might want to come to his venue the following night and handing them leaflets. Now he cannot do that and says that the inability to leaflet is destroying the interaction between venues and the public. He says that, as a result, clubs are leaving the area. Revolution, a country-wide chain of music bars, has just left, saying that its branch in the city had the worst takings in the country. He himself is planning to shut up shop and go to nearby Birmingham, where apparently the city council has a much more enlightened view of how to promote small venues and the small bands coming to those venues. Of course, the expense of leafleting is not the only problem these venues face, but it is a definite problem all the same.

The only people who seem to be able to afford to leaflet in Wolverhampton city centre are the commercial leafleting companies acting on behalf of big businesses, which have the money. They obviously bring revenue to the council but at a heavy cost to regenerating the high street. However, even that stream of money will be threatened if there are no customers using the city centre for them to leaflet. I also spoke to Henry Carver, who runs a non-political business group that is trying to regenerate the city centre. He said:

“We vie with Hull as the unemployment capital of England. What we need to do is to do anything to encourage businesses in the city so that people can be employed”.

This Bill would be one way of doing so. He does not want the council to have to subsidise small businesses for leafleting but wants the cost to be covered in some way. All the same, he believes that the current rules are restrictive.

Wolverhampton is a bad case but, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, the situation is echoed in other city and town centres across the country, from Leicester to Basildon. Freeing up the ability of cultural centres to leaflet will certainly not solve all their problems. We have to do everything possible to regenerate our high streets. They are the centres of our communities and the cultural engines of our country. To lose them will be to lose an important part of our national life. I urge the Minister to help this Bill to become law.