It is great to see that high streets have been all over our news. The Guardian, in particular, should be celebrated for its championing of the cause of Boosting Britain’s High Streets. Why is it suddenly everywhere? It is partly because of some exemplary research by Prof. Will Jennings at the University of Southampton on ‘perspectives of place’. One of its key findings – at least as far as politicians are concerned – is that when asked ‘how would you say the area where you live compares with other areas?’ Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters all say their area is better than others. Green voters average out at neutral, while Reform voters resoundingly say their area is worse than others.
Jennings opts against reading too deeply into this as anything more than an observation. But we can afford to be slightly more political, and make the case that there are two obvious potential causes for this. Either, people ideologically inclined to vote for ‘change’ parties are more likely to have a worse view of their area, or, people who live in deprived areas are more likely to intend to vote for a ‘change’ party. Both are pretty plausible, and they are not contradictory ideas. Irrespective, based on current polling, this means about 45% of voters think their area is worse than others. Whether they are correct in that view would depend on much deeper research, but what is important is that they feel that way. Politics is political, people vote on feelings – not graphs or data.
Understandably this research has led to all sorts of media coverage about why high streets are terrible. Little attention has actually been paid to how to change that feeling. If we take as a rule that people who think their area is bad will vote Reform, the onus is on the incumbent government to make it such that fewer people think their area is bad if they want to stay in power.
Last month the government committed to creating a High Streets Strategy. I love the idea of that – I think everyone does. But I would caution the government that given the journalistic furor around the delay of the Child Poverty Strategy and the Warm Homes Plan that kicking these cans down the road embeds public cynicism, rather than uplifts it. And just publishing a strategy doesn’t cut mustard. What voters care about is its implementation. This is something that everybody in government knows, but seldom acts on.
Our Boosting Britain’s High Streets campaign hopes to make the government’s life easier in this regard. We are more than happy to help steward the strategists in coming up with their ideas, but to save everybody the time in the interim we continue to produce off-the-shelf policy ideas the government can use today, tomorrow or the day after. Some of these are obvious: ring-fenced funding in local authorities, surplus to existing budgets, for town centre managers. These are designated local authority figures who essentially have high street health as a full time responsibility.
If you’re a local authority trying to scrimp and save, town centre manager roles are the sort that are quite expendable. It’s not like temporary housing costs, which you really can’t afford to cut costs on – they are a boon to a high street but if they are doing their job properly you don’t notice they are there. So if the national government is serious, they ought to produce the money themselves. Having accountable professionals overseeing a place is a key difference between having a strategic vision for a town centre versus not having one.
Of course, fiscal budgets exist, and given the broader economic context it is understandable why the government is so keen to avoid funding new, novel ideas (although town centre managers aren’t really novel). But there are many cheaper ideas that work. At our campaign’s launch last October, as well as raising attention to the benefit of town centre managers, we highlighted the benefit of making the Land Registry free to access and publicly available. The value in doing this can be illustrated perfectly well from the Guardian’s coverage of Newton Aycliffe, where a single owner owns almost the entire town centre. Do you know who owns your high street? Probably not. If you’re an aspiring buyer wanting to set up shop, it’s just another bureaucratic hoop to jump through, for data that is quite difficult to gather.
Boosting Britain’s High Streets is in the process of putting together its next report, which will look at the policy frictions preventing new businesses from being able to enter the market or to scale. This, we hope, will be a great way to provide government with the original thought and stimulus to not just prepare for better high street policymaking, but to enact it.
