What should be done with our high streets? Novel suggestions abound at the moment. The Sunday Politics South East devoted a section this week to the proposal on Kent County Council that a tax be levied on large supermarket chains and the proceeds be spent on Kentish towns’ high streets.
Meanwhile, in Derry-Londonderry, 2013’s City of Culture, the local council tidied up the city by installing fake shop fronts in empty units to make the city more appealing to tourists.
The way we use our environment, and in particular our ‘urban’ environment (by which I include village in this instance), has been changing for decades, first with the invention of supermarkets, and latterly of course with the internet. There’s nothing wrong with those changes – indeed, people shop in supermarkets and online because it makes the process quicker, easier, cheaper and more appealing.
It’s natural to want to preserve our environments as we know them, but these changes in the way we shop and interact socially are bound to have an effect on our high streets. Likewise, the way we do business will change urban spaces and impact transport policy – more and more people are setting up businesses that allow them to work remotely, rather than commuting to work in an office.
Yet this natural evolution in the way we live does not appear to have been factored into planning in general. Little surprise perhaps, as councillors tend to be predominantly drawn from older age groups who are understandably most likely to want to see the towns they have lived for many years preserved as they are. But as the years go on, a rethink of the way in which we want to use our high streets and urban spaces is surely a must.
Modern transport has shrunk our world. Before cars, my village would have been a three hour walk from the nearest market town, so it made sense for shops and services to be provided locally. Now I can be at Tescos or on my high street in under ten minutes (and regularly am).
People also have a greater tendancy to move around the country according to changing jobs and lifestyles. I myself have lived in seven different towns in the last decade; my sister has done something similar (in her case she made it as far as New York, Moscow and Hamburg for periods of time). So although we hear a lot about youngsters wanting to stay in the village in which they were born, it’s probably more accurate to say that they want to return their when they settle with a partner (who may not be from the same place).
While these changes has meant the demise of local provision of every service, it offers opportunity by way of specialisation. My village is home to a very good residential home for disabled adults, who would love to see their facilities more widely used by disabled people in the community. I’m told that the county council may also be able to replace our high kerbs with wheelchair friendly ones. Could we, by making small changes to the way the village is laid out, ‘specialise’ in being a village that people with extra needs might want to live in?
Our changes would also have a knock-on effect – the local bus company might be more minded to provide buses adapted for wheelchair use, or some enterprising soul might set up a taxi company providing a similar service, as there would be enough trade to justify it.
This sort of specialisation is nothing new – the larger cities have always sported a ‘jewelry quarter’, ‘restaurant quarter’, even a ‘red light zone’. But the population level in more rural areas has never been able to support these specialisations, until now. We could have ‘foodie towns’, ‘arty towns’ and ‘theatre towns’.
So why don’t we? In a word, planning. Our current planners are so obsessed with preserving our historical use of public spaces, they don’t appear to have realised that that way of life has gone. Added to other problems such as lack of flexibility over business rates, it all adds up to empty shop fronts across Britain.
There’s only one thing for it: if we want to enjoy our city, town and village centres as bustling, tidy environments again, we must revolutionise the way planning is regulated.
Of course the car [ and now the internet] has much to do with the problem as we are no longer required to shop locally. Nevertheless the french manage protect their small retailers. Here we tax them out of existence: high business rates, high rents and frequent reviews and which don’t reflect turnover, and high parking charges/fines/controls in run down and often inaccessible public town centre car parks. Meanwhile the government and Councils allow free parking at out of town superstores [ which increasingly are selling everything] .Then there’s likes of Amazon and Apple siphoning off profits from on line sales in the UK from low cost warehouses , [ in lower land value locations and which probably pay proportionately less in business rates] to shell companies elsewhere in the EU where corporation tax is lower. With the competition stacked against them like this its no wonder our High Streets are failing.
Why not give small independents a tax break/exemption from rates until they reach a certain revenue threshold or for a certain amount of time. That would allow new shops a grace period to settle and grow before being clobbered by rates. Once that shop has grown to a certain size or has expanded to become a ‘chain’, you could even claw some of the revenue back. This could also help towns become a bit more distinctive again rather than clones with the likes of Next and Starbucks.
The answer to reviving High Street shops is to make parking easier and more affordable, particularly in small towns and villages.
Many people just want to pop to their local shops for one or two items but find that due to parking restrictions they can’t park in or near the High Street and are forced into a car park which may mean a walk and will almost certainly require them to pay for an hour’s parking at minimum.
We need free 20 minute parking. Long enough to pop in and buy a couple of items and stop off at the cashpoint. Parking policy is dis-incentivising people from using their local shops. We need to address that.
We also need to turn Town High Streets into places of leisure and entertainment: where they are pedestrianised, install some children’s’ play equipment; encourage street entertainment and food fairs (with sampling). We have plenty of amateur dramatic societies in the country – why not encourage them to put on an outdoor play and hold a collection to fund their societies.
We are blinkered by believing that the High Street is just a place to shop. It isn’t: it’s a place to socialise and be a part of society.
Donna, disability access to things like kerbs, and public transport should already be the norm. Being a wheelchair user, I know this is not always the case. The other thing one has to realise is that most people, able bodied people, will at points in their life become ‘less able’ for example a woman pushing a buggy, loaded with shopping and a toddler in tow. Public & private services and facilities should account for different life stages. Good design makes these unnoticeable when in daily use.
I do like the idea of increasing business rates on large out of town facilities and rerouting and diverting them to subsidise smaller High Street outlets.
I also like the idea to allow free use (as opposed to licensing) of public spaces for people to have market stalls to sell products and things that cannot be bought in a normal retail outlet i.e. not a competition to those shops. Things sold could be homemade jams, things grown in a garden, crafts, second hand items that still are good etc. That way people will be attracted to the High Street again.
On the Isle of Wight we have begun a petition calling for an abolition of Business Rates. These taxes are applied before a shop has had a chance to make money and act as a deterrent to employment and investment. After all, if the shop does well then tax revenues are taken via Corporation and Income Taxes as well as VAT over the till. To take money up-front is absurd. Moreover, by applying BR to vacant shells the landlords are passing this charge onto new tenants and acting as a further economic deterrent. Andrew Perloff of Panther Securities, a specialist commercial property fund, estimated that a two year moratorium on rates would lead to 150,000 new jobs. An eye-watering prospect.