Future of Town Centres and High Streets

I am grateful for being called to speak, and I compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) on securing this important debate. The number of Members present indicates how important this matter is, not only to us but to our constituents. I shall start by outlining the situation in my constituency. Sherwood comprises a number of small former coalfield towns with high streets and market areas. They are all are under enormous pressure, but those individual towns face very different challenges and vary greatly in their approach to them. In summary, there is no silver bullet that will solve individual problems, which have to be sorted out at local level, and many different challenges have to be addressed. Some of those challenges affect all the towns and are similar wherever we go. Many Members have talked about the rateable value of properties once they become empty, and the challenge of how to put pressure on landlords to let them. Landlords have a role to play, however, because when they are approached by individual retailers about empty properties, the rent that they want to charge and the length of the lease that they want to offer on shops can sometimes be an enormous challenge to anybody wanting to start a small business. Somebody who has not run a shop may want to dip their toe in the water, and then take the big leap and start their own business, but if they approach a landlord who wants an extraordinarily high rent and a very long lease, they can find it daunting to commit themselves to that process and sign on the dotted line, knowing that they might expose not only their business but their home and other assets. So landlords have a role to play. Local authorities have a role to play as well. Members have mentioned parking schemes, and it is worth reiterating the impact on someone's decision-making process of the cost of parking a vehicle. They may want to buy just a newspaper or a pint of milk and think, ““Where am I going to do that?”” If they have to pay 50p to park their car to buy milk, they will choose somewhere free of charge, rather than somewhere where they have to pay almost the price of the bottle of milk to park before they can buy it. I compliment the councils local to me that have taken the trouble to abolish parking charges so that residents can make that choice, but we have to understand why charges are in place. In my constituency there are places where, once charges have been completely removed, other residents use the spaces to park and ride into the city of Nottingham, blocking up car parks and preventing shoppers from using them. There is also an enormous emphasis on consumers. Many Members have mentioned supermarkets located close to a high street, but they will not be successful unless consumers make use of them by going in there and spending their money. Consumers are very good at saying, ““We want our high street to be successful,”” but sometimes they talk the talk and do not walk the walk: they use supermarkets rather than supporting their high street. Consumers cannot have it both ways, however. They have to make use of the high street and ensure that they support the shops in their community. We also need to look at the physical size of the high street. In certain towns it may be possible to convert some properties from retail to residential use and thus shrink the high street, to make a more concentrated area of shops, where we can address their quality, fill the empty ones with shops from the periphery and allow for the residential use of the peripheral properties. That would have the knock-on effect of taking the pressure off the green belt around our towns, and we could include residential areas on our high streets. I am grateful for having had this opportunity to speak, and I encourage my constituents to go out and make use of their high street. The strapline for this debate should be ““Use it or lose it””.