Mary Portas has good ideas for restoring our town centres. Local councils must listen.
This article has much symmetry with the Plunkett piece on social enterprise. It sets out some of the perceived impacts of local authorities on the viability of Town centres. It tells us:
“Some of Miss Portas’s ideas do require some imagination on the part of the local traders and a willingness to innovate and modernise. But many obstacles to high street renaissance are erected by local authorities: costly business rates make it hard for shops to turn a profit, while the lack of easy accessibility deters customers. The cost of parking in particular is something that councils should address urgently, yet they refuse to do so because of the amount of cash it generates. This is ultimately self-defeating: as fewer people visit the high street, so parking revenues will fall.
To encourage shoppers to return, councils should look seriously at introducing controlled free parking and abolishing evening and weekend charges. They should also consider a community right to buy or “right to try” empty properties, which could breathe new life into decrepit shopping streets. So, too, would ensuring that the Government’s controversial planning shake-up prioritises town centre development over rural building.”
Much of this resonates but I still think ultimately it is the business skills of retailers which will determine their success or not. This is where public policy should focus. I recall, what seems a life time ago now, being challenged by a shop keeper in Gainsborough over the impact of the pedestrianisation of part of the town centre on her business. She was proud to have only taken the price of running her car out of the business for the last 5 years and was accusing the Council of now jeopardising even that. I reflected that she had a significantly under capitalised business and through relying on her husband’s salary had been running a hobby business. That’s not to say it wasn’t providing some real utility but as the recession is now exposing, along many high streets in England, there is no real sustainability in the way many of our smaller town centres have evolved over the last quarter of a century – with many shops having struggled to “stand on their own commercial feet” for years.
I was reflecting earlier in the week on exactly the same issue in the context of small farms dependent on the off farm income of one or both partners in a relationship and the impact the recession is having on their viability. But that is a story for a future edition of Hinterland!