Future of Town Centres and High Streets

I join virtually every colleague who has spoken in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) on securing the debate—a truly inspired move—and the Backbench Business Committee on ensuring that it happened. I have had the pleasure of sitting through most of the debate and hearing the many by and large excellent contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the House. I have enjoyed it tremendously in the run-up to the Government's response to the Portas review. Of course, the debate has very much been spurred by the Mary Portas report, which was undertaken after the Prime Minister personally asked her to go out, look at what was happening in our town centres and high streets and make a series of proposals to make things better. There are 28 proposals in all, many of them quite detailed and many of which Members have touched on. It has been fascinating to weigh up Members' representations. As one Member suggested, it has been like an afternoon and evening of sitting through maiden speeches, because every Member mentioned every town and village in their constituency. It made the debate much more enjoyable. I should, as everyone else seems to have done, declare an interest—one Member declared a disinterest—by saying that 21 years ago last month, I started my own retail shop, a print business, so I have had some experience in retail and found out how tough it can be on the high street. Among the many significant problems that retailers have to overcome can be intransigence from local authorities, which, it has to be said, have until now had almost no interest in business in their area, and particularly in the retail sector. Why? Well, retail businesses do not vote, and the local authority does not get to keep their money. One of the most important reforms, therefore, which Mary Portas mentions in the report, must be the localisation of business rates. I am delighted that that legislation is now going through the House. Speaking as that small shop owner, I know that it will be of considerable help to many people. Alongside that, of course, local authorities will have the ability to provide a discount on business rates if they choose to. The legislation will make that all the more easy. As I am speaking in this debate, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the wonderful town of Hatfield suffers greatly from the same problems that many Members have described. It was a new town, and so bright was its future when it was set up. Unfortunately, partly because of the situation that has been mentioned—the road and the cars were taken out of the town centre, and the life was sucked out of it—it has struggled to have a renaissance. As the Minister taking the response to the Portas review forward, I can assure right hon. and hon. Members that I have personal experience of a failing town centre that needs to be rescued. That is why I take many of the measures suggested in the review so much to heart. Car parking was the No. 1 concern mentioned by Members in the 54 contributions. It is absolutely right, and in fact quite obvious, to say that in today's society, when people either do not need to get into their car at all because they can simply click on something with a mouse to buy it or, if the option is available, as it now is in most parts of the country, drive to a shopping mall or shopping centre, an uncompetitive high street with high parking charges will always make a retail district suffer. It is absolutely essential, even in these incredibly tough times, for local authorities to appreciate that hammering the motorist visiting the local shops will not be the solution to the area's problems, and certainly not to those of retailers. Everything comes back to the fact that in future, under the localisation of business rates, for the first time it will matter to local councillors that businesses survive and thrive, because the local business rates will be retained. The second most-mentioned item in the debate was the Mary Portas concept of town teams. That is the idea that if people want to promote their town, they need to get together. That involves not just the usual suspects—the town centre manager and perhaps an interested local councillor—but everyone, from the retailers and landlords to the council, and most notably Members of Parliament, forming a town team and leading the debate. If I am enormously enthused about one thing in the debate, it is that so many Members—it must be said that I am referring mostly to Government Members, who have largely filled the House—spoke with enormous passion and made it clear that they intend to lead the debate in their local areas. That will do an awful lot of good. Members, and particularly the shadow Minister, mentioned the ““town centre first”” policy. Government Members would be far more tempted to take lectures on different solutions for the town centre—or whatever this week's soundbite is from Her Majesty's Opposition—if Opposition Members actually attended the debate. There were significant periods when but one person—the shadow Secretary of State—sat on the Opposition Benches. I felt so sorry for him—he seemed so lonely—that I was tempted to join him. People in the country and retailers would take Opposition Members' comments all the more seriously if they were expressed in this House. Mary Portas has made many different recommendations and the Government have made a number of significant moves, including, for example, doubling the small business rate relief for two and half years to help small businesses through the Localism Act 2011; scrapping Whitehall planning guidance, which forced up parking charges in the past; changing the planning rules to allow councils to provide more parking spaces; and updating the licensing laws to give councils more power to tackle antisocial behaviour and, of course, the problems that came in with the 24-hour drinking laws. I said that I would respond on the ““town centre first”” policy. We have focused on retail development in town centres. The national planning policy framework will be released by the spring. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) was quite wrong to say that it does not put town centres first, because it absolutely does. It is very clearly written, so I suggest she looks at the text again. We believe that town centres should be considered very strongly when making decisions. To reinforce that, the 2011 Act and the move towards giving local people the ability to make decisions, which was mentioned by more than one of my hon. Friends, mean that it will be much easier in future for local areas to prioritise in the way that they would wish to ensure that developments happen in the right way.