Future of Town Centres and High Streets

Jim Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

I am sorely tempted to throw my notes away and to join the hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) in castigating English Heritage, but I shall resist.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate and all those Members who approached the Committee, of whom I was one. The debate is a reflection of their wisdom, because this issue clearly excites interest on both sides of the House and across the country, largely because everybody has a local high street and a local town centre—not just Members of Parliament, but individual citizens. The importance of the welfare of high streets and town centres cannot be overestimated.

The issues around town centres and high streets are perennial. I join others in welcoming the Government’s commissioning of a report from Mary Portas and her work. The report introduces some new language, and anyone who reads it can tell that it has been written not by a planning professional or a civil servant, but by somebody whose main qualification is in the business about which they are speaking and whose enthusiasm is patently transparent. That runs through the whole report. I am not quite familiar with a few expressions in the report—I do not know what she means by a “three-dimensional retailing experience”—but we can forgive that kind of hyperbole when the essence of what she addresses is so critical to the health of so many of our communities.

I notice that the Government say they will have their response out by the spring, which I think means the day before the House rises in the summer, whatever date in July that might be. I hope the Minister takes into account what people say and how important this issue is. I sometimes worry about Ministers’ responses to Backbench Business Committee debates. They accept motions—although there are no specifics in today’s motion—but spend all their time during their speeches explaining why they do not agree with them. I hope that that will not be the case today.

High streets and town centres mean different things in different parts of the country—they mean different things in urban areas, semi-urban areas, towns and villages—but in both this country and around the world, the common denominator is that the local market, however we describe it, is a key ingredient of the local community. In many ways, it defines the local community. As others have said, it is not just a place of trade and exchange, but a place of social interaction and opportunity, a meeting place and a centre for all kinds of activity, not merely retail.

There are many different aspects of the high street debate. I agree with the hon. Member for South West Devon that the threat is no longer from new out-of-town developments. Time will tell whether we have sold the pass on that and whether we allowed too many developments in previous years with which the traditional local ribbon high streets must contend, but the threat is not from new developments.

[Robert Halfon]

I am listening to the hon. Gentleman’s thoughtful speech. He says that local retail centres are not a threat, but all the retail centres in Harlow are very popular and have a huge advantage because they have free parking. People can park outside the door and go about their daily business at the retail centres, whereas many shopping precincts—not just in Harlow, but all around the country—are paved over and very difficult to park near, and many have parking charges. Does he agree that free parking would make a huge difference, as my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) suggested?

[Jim Dowd]

I shall come to that in a moment. Perhaps I have not made myself clear. I do not think that the threat comes from new developments, the construction of which seems largely to have abated, as the hon. Member for South West Devon pointed out. The fear is that we have already created too many of them, and that they will still have an effect on the traditional town centres and high streets.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that our high streets have a wider role in supporting local supply chains and increasing local resilience? In some areas, there is still a threat not only from out-of-town developments but from large distribution depots, which are merely displacing jobs rather than creating new ones.

[Jim Dowd]

That is indeed true.

I was involved in producing a report a few years ago, and we discovered that, in the large retail sector, it takes £150,000 worth of turnover to support one job, whereas the comparable figure for small and independent retailers is £100,000. So, small and independent retailers are much more likely than large ones to produce employment. They are also much more likely to be used by people locally, and the value stays within the local community rather than being exported to a national centre elsewhere. They are also of much greater value to the community in terms of social cohesion as well as retailing.

Some 10 years ago, I was approached by the Independent Retailers Confederation at an event here in the House, and we had further discussions. I then tabled an early-day motion relating to retail crime and under-age purchasing, which highlighted the fact that although those issues apply to all retailers, they present a bigger challenge and have a greater effect on small retailers than they do on the large multiples. I know that some Members take a proprietorial—almost parental—interest in their early-day motions, e-mailing and writing to everyone to ask them to sign them. I take a much more hands-off approach, however; I table them and send them off to find their own place in the world. So, I submitted the EDM with only my name on it, but within a week, it had attracted about 88 signatures.

I spoke to some of the Members who had supported my motion, and it became clear that although there had been an all-party parliamentary retail group for many years, there was a strong feeling that its work did not reflect the interests of small and independent retailers. I am not criticising its work at all; I think that it is a valuable adjunct to the work of the House and the interests of its Members. It is fronted by the British Retail Consortium, which is an estimable organisation that does a good job of representing its interests. However, the consortium effectively represents large retail traders and multiples. That is perfectly legitimate, but the idea that it represents small and independent businesses is just plain wrong. We need only to look at its membership lists to discover that fact. It includes some online businesses that have no trading premises, but, apart from those, its idea of a small trader with only one outlet is Harrod’s or Fortnum and Mason. They are not small retailers, by anyone’s definition.

We then formed the all-party parliamentary small shops group. I am particularly indebted to the hon. Members for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) and for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), and to the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans), now the First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means, as well as to the right hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander), now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith). We undertook to establish an inquiry, along the lines of that of a Select Committee, into the future of the high street. It was the first report of its kind, and it attracted a lot of attention. We made a number of recommendations, most of which were ignored. Some, however, were enacted, and some were partly enacted. There is, however, a wealth of information, material and advice on the future of the high street, of which Mary Portas’s report is just the latest. There is also the all-party small shops group’s report from seven years ago and reports from the Evening Standard and various community groups and academic organisations. I hope that the Government will take long-overdue action and relentlessly pursue a policy in the interests of retailers of all sizes and the communities that they serve.