10 things the Government can do to help the high street

As new high streets minister Penny Mordaunt plans to embark on a national town centre tour, Labour’s high street advisor Bill Grimsey offers 10 suggestions on where she should take immediate action to stop the rot, rebuild confidence and help lead a genuine high street recovery.

1. Recognise that town centres and high streets can no longer thrive as a retail destination alone. It’s well documented that there’s too much retail floor space in the UK. I can’t fault Penny’s enthusiasm for getting to grips with the problems facing our high street. She’s said she wants “to make things happen”, but she has to recognize that the current high street model is bust. Equally, she can’t escape the dismal record of her predecessors in this Government.  There remain over 40,000 empty shops on our high streets, footfall and consumer confidence is down and we’ve just seen retail insolvencies hit a five-year high. We need a vision for the 21^st century and it’s time ministers understood this.

2. Reform business rates now and look at taking as many small businesses as possible out of the rating system. One of the biggest failings of this Government has been its obstinate refusal to listen to cries from all corners of the business world to reform business rates. This tax does not reflect prevailing economic conditions or what businesses are able to pay and it’s simply not fit for purpose. I’ve met some people paying three times their rent in business rates. Where once the high street was a hotbed of innovation, it’s now the Internet that’s the most innovative seedbed for business. That’s because business rates are actively preventing people setting up bricks and mortar ventures and we should be looking at big ideas like taking up to a million small businesses out of the rating system. By slimming down the Valuation Office Agency, introducing annual revaluations to cut down on appeals and making savings from transitional relief and administration costs, this can be done in a way that’s affordable to the Treasury.

3. Promote the concept of a community hub solution incorporating health, housing, education, arts, entertainment, business/office space, manufacturing and leisure to encourage the shift to what has to become a post retail landscape in many town centres. This is the only way to bring back footfall and make high streets vibrant places at the heart of their community once more.   The previous high streets minister, Brandon Lewis, spent too much time championing fast food and betting shops. High streets of the future must have a bigger vision than this. They need to be inspirational places that meet the needs of local communities.

4. Establish a Town Centre Commission for each town with a defined skill base and structure to build a 20-year vision for local high streets supported by a broad business plan in five-year chunks. Our research established that most local authorities have no plans for their high streets. There is no long-term vision in place and that’s why far too many places are stuck in limbo, bereft of ideas and in serious decline. Town teams have injected some much-needed enthusiasm but lack the skills and strategic, long-term planning that’s needed.

5. Inject some urgency to reforming parking guidance and look beyond councils to cowboy clampers and private parking enforcers. Ministers have been talking about clamping down on over zealous parking enforcement for years yet council parking fines keep going up and no one notices any difference. It’s time to turn the rhetoric into reality and make sure that private and public parking providers operate a more sensible policy that doesn’t simply view the high street as a cash cow to be milked as aggressively as possible.

6. Freeze car parking charges and introduce two hour free parking in town centres. Despite a landmark ruling that councils can’t use parking as a revenue raising service, parking charges continue to rise. It’s time we had a freeze to give motorists some respite and encourage people to come back into town centres.

7. Seek a massive increase in the number of Business Improvement Districts (BIDS). Many towns have weathered the recession better than others thanks to BIDS. Businesses need to work smartly with other community partners to make their areas more responsive to local needs. We’ve seen some progress on this, but we need to go much faster in encouraging their growth.

8. Promote the concept of a “wired town” or “networked high street” by putting libraries at the centre of the community as technology hubs that will develop existing technology to nurture learning and creative thinking. Civic hackers are flocking to U.S libraries to use the power of technology to solve civic problems. While here in the UK we’re busy closing libraries and failing to realize the amazing potential they have to be transformed into 21^st century digital hubs. This is shortsighted. We are still way behind on broadband speed too and must catch up quickly, as places like South Korea race ahead.

9. Introduce a regional factor for business rates to address the changes in valuations to compensate for the delay in revaluations to 2017. There have been some bad decisions in this Government, but business rates policy has been disastrous. Introducing the biggest increase in business rates in 20-years as we came out of recession was hardly a clever move, but cancelling a much-needed revaluation to bring rates back in line with property values made matters much worse. Business rates are still based on pre-recession 2008 data when retailers were paying top of the market rents. Many areas have seen a big fall in rents and property values and are subsequently paying massively over-inflated rates. We need to look at rates in terms of regions, and where business property prices have significantly gone down a factor should be applied to their rating to reduce taxation. Likewise the same should be applied where property prices have risen. At the moment unfairness is embedded in the system.

10. Enable the change of use planning process to be used to convert entire streets to residential and repopulate town centres. Town centres have grown exponentially in recent years to the point where we have too much retail space that can’t be filled. As major chains continue to consolidate their portfolios and move out of secondary locations and the consumer shift online and to out of town locations continues, many town centres are being hollowed out and turned into ghost towns. We need to get people living there to have a chance of creating a different future.