Matt Vickers is Conservative MP for Stockton South and Chair of the APPG on the Way forward for Retail
Whereas Westminster has been firmly targeted on the race to determine our subsequent prime minister, many Conservative MPs – together with myself – have been busy working onerous in our constituencies. It’s right here that we get to listen to what actually issues to voters within the communities by which they reside. Time and time once more, folks carry up the identical factor: their native excessive avenue.
It’s no secret that our excessive streets are struggling. We have now seen the expansion of out-of-town retail and on-line procuring, whereas the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living disaster have solely made issues worse. In all components of the UK, shuttered retailers are a characteristic of our excessive streets. Information from the Native Information Firm exhibits one in 20 excessive avenue items have sat empty for greater than 3 years. That is significantly acute within the locations the place voters put their belief within the Conservatives in 2019 and that we have to win on the subsequent election. My neck of the woods, the North East, is the area with the very best proportion of persistently vacant excessive streets properties in Britain.
Excessive streets are central to folks’s satisfaction in place; that’s the reason revitalising our excessive streets is an important piece of the levelling up puzzle. When folks take into consideration levelling up they consider their native space, particularly their excessive avenue – 69 per cent of individuals fear in regards to the decline of their excessive avenue and the impact on civic satisfaction. We can not, as a celebration and as a rustic, sit again and let this proceed.
On a latest journey to Dumfries in Scotland, I noticed a part of the answer. I visited the sensible Midsteeple Quarter together with enterprise and neighborhood leaders and the native council, to have a look at how neighborhood possession of property can breathe new life into the excessive avenue. The advantages had been clear strolling by the city centre. Trying to my proper I noticed the unhappy sight of a now empty Burtons retailer, courting again to 1934. To my left, stood the colourful fronts of the community-owned areas that Midsteeple Quarter has taken management of to revitalise the excessive avenue.
We met in a gathering room above a bustling arts and crafts store and spent a while in a formidable meals pictures studio – all in the identical constructing owned by the local people. Clearly this isn’t in regards to the demise of retail – the mixed-use house the place we held our assembly serves as an ideal instance of how community-owned property function ‘vacation spot areas’ that may drive footfall to different native companies and increase retail.
These community-owned areas additionally contribute extra to the native financial system, with 56p of each £1 they spend staying native, in comparison with simply 40p for big non-public sector companies. Neighborhood-owned areas can assist new or rising types of financial exercise, corresponding to hybrid industrial and social enterprise.
I used to be glad to see the federal government take some necessary steps to handle excessive avenue decline within the Levelling Up and Regeneration Invoice, which plans to introduce excessive avenue rental auctions for buildings which might be vacant for longer than 12 months. However there’s room for Conservatives to go additional to show a dedication to revitalising our excessive streets and delivering on levelling up. A technique we might do that is by establishing a Excessive Road Buyout Fund that may compete with distant homeowners with little curiosity within the place, to buy excessive avenue buildings on behalf of native communities and provides them time to lift the capital to buy it themselves.
Revitalising our excessive streets must be high of the pile on the checklist of points that our subsequent prime minister should ship on, whoever they might be. Boosting neighborhood possession on the excessive avenue is an modern and cost-effective means of doing that. The general public put their religion in us to stage up, now’s the time for us to ship. We will not be forgiven if we don’t.
