Healthy Towns Make for a Healthy Country

Healthy Towns Make for a Healthy Country

Foreword by Brian Binley MP

Our town and city centres lie at the heart of our communities and are as vital to their health as the heart is to the body. Yet over the last thirty years or so, the centres of many of our communities have suffered a gradual but persistent decline. Ring roads have isolated them, parking charges have depleted them, out-of-town development detracted from them, poor planning undermined them and anti-social behaviour made them less safe and less attractive places to visit.

Whilst many of the individual factors might in themselves not seem to cause major harm, their combined effect over many years can be to put once-active and robust community hubs into seemingly interminable decline. This naturally has an impact on the pride and sense of belonging people feel towards their own communities, but also their country too. Too often I hear people say their town centre is a mess, and in the very next breath add that the country is going downhill, almost as though the two were directly linked. And perhaps they are.

The most obvious symptom of this decline is the near disappearance of the independent small retailer from our high streets. They provide diversity, charm, interest and a level of personal service that is becoming all too rare in today’s town centre, and their loss is keenly felt by many. The boarded-up shop fronts, the graffiti, the absence of visitors, all pay sad testimony to the decay of so many of our towns.

However the trend is not irreversible; restoring small shops to our town centres can be as iconic as restoring salmon to the Thames.

I recently chaired a Commission into Britain’s high streets and we have created a strategy for restoring the ability of local communities to act collectively to rebuild the health of their community hubs.

The Commission was established to look into the future of small shops in Britain’s high streets and bring forward new ideas to regenerate our country’s town centres. We conducted consultations with a wide range of retail and local government experts and other interest groups, to consider the threats and opportunities facing small independent retailers; we looked at common characteristics of successful town centres; finally we examined a broad range of issues, including retail and commercial activity, planning and development, local taxation, crime and policing, traffic management and transport.

Local retailers in our high streets are affected by a huge range of decisions made by government at the local, regional, national and international level. From EU rules on weights and measures to local decisions on bus routes, local retailers have to negotiate the complex decisions produced by a multi-layered bureaucracy. These rules are incredibly important and, when made successfully, add great value to our local communities.

Local authorities are the most visible and influential of the layers of government and have considerable influence in all of the areas reviewed by this Commission. Consequently they have the greatest power to irrevocably damage or greatly improve the local business environment.

But the majority of councils can do far more to capitalise on their towns’ unique heritage, history and location. The promotion of farmers’ markets, tourism and historical buildings can all play their part in emphasising a community’s distinctive feel and there are many examples of towns that have regenerated themselves through playing to their geographic strengths.

Market towns are a good example. The National Market Traders Federation note that social spaces are currently often designed without any thought for a market and Redditch was cited as an example of the fluctuations in the fortunes of a market at the hands of poor decision-making.

I also believe it is important to keep the current ‘needs test,’ incorporated within Planning Policy Statement 6 (PPS6), first introduced by John Gummer in 1993. PPS6 has the most direct relevance to the retail sector and the commercial balance of large and small retailers in any given town or village, an importance noted by the Competition Commission in their recent Grocery Market Investigation.

PPS6 sets out government policy on planning for town centres and requires a needs assessment to be conducted when an application for an out-of-town development is made, ensuring there is a genuine need for this in the local area. However, the Government’s White Paper on Planning, published in May last year, contained proposals to scrap the needs test for out-of-town retail developments, a recommendation that many experts believe could damage town centres by making such developments far easier to pass. For example, it has been argued that the removal of the needs test will accelerate the decline of town centres by undermining the strength of existing planning policies and permitting far more out-of-town development.

At present edge-of-town development is the most successful retail location with sales growing by 40% over the last 5 years to £72billion. But the reasoning behind the White Paper’s proposal to scrap the needs tests stemmed from the Barker Review of Land Use Planning which argued for its removal because it was liable to ‘protect incumbents and give preference to operators that have lower sales densities.’

Whilst I note these concerns, local authorities should have more say in matters that potentially affect the vitality of crucial shopping areas, and that the retention of the needs test is vital to allowing councils to make appropriate decisions for their own areas. 96% of local Planning Officers are against the removal of the test and many contributors to the Commission argued that the test should actually be strengthened.

It is so important that our high street and town centres are not simply allowed to lose their character and sense of place, which are so vital to attracting shoppers, simply due to the bad use of planning regulations.

The broad recommendations made by the Commission are that political parties play a leadership role in promoting town management partnership initiatives that encourage local communities to work together to protect and improve the quality of their high streets.

We also want to encourage more local authorities to promote joint initiatives with businesses and the police to tackle crime and disorder; and encourage them to give stronger consideration to the impact of parking provision and charging on high street and town centre vitality.

It also suggests a new framework together with possible options through which new local ventures can be mobilised to support a new wave of community revitalisation, be it in satellite areas around big cities, in smaller cities, towns or in the village high street.

With people in local communities acting together to revitalise our high streets, I believe we have created a renewed sense of well-being which will impact upon the health of the nation as a whole.