Future of Town Centres and High Streets

I am pleased to be taking part in this debate about the health of our high streets and town centres. I will risk making the passing comment that to see so many colleagues here to take part in a debate with a one-line Whip suggests that there is not a lot wrong with the health of our Parliament. It is an encouraging sight. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) for triggering this debate, and Mary Portas for producing an excellent report on our high streets and town centres. High streets and town centres have been under assault for many years from out-of-town shopping centres. Perhaps that horse has now bolted, but there is the new threat of internet purchasing. That is, in part, a generational thing. In the place where I live now there are four families, as three of our grown-up children and their spouses have joined us in our little community, which was described, when I became a Minister in 1996, as an evangelical community on the edge of Dartmoor. That sounds very alternative, but it is nothing like that. With three families of a younger generation, it seems that the delivery vans arrive several times a day as a result of their internet shopping. We grandparents are not really doing it, but the younger generation are. This is a very new assault on the high street. That is why I strongly support what is perhaps the key recommendation of the report—that a new vision for the high street must recognise that it is not just about retail but about culture, community and leisure. We must make a visit to the high street or the town centre like a day out. It should be a pleasurable experience, and not just about retail.