HS2020 research presented at Inside Government: Next Steps for Revitalising UK High Streets

A guest blog by Dr Costastas Theodoridis and Dr Amna Kahn, of the Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University

Town-centre and BID managers, policy-makers, practitioners and academics were gathered in London to discuss the revitalisation of the UK High Streets. In the all-day ‘Next Steps for Revitalising UK High Streets’ event delegates had the opportunity to find out about the recent developments in digital and traditional high-street management and development. The event was chaired by Dr Fiona Ellis-Chadwick from Loughborough University who also delivered a keynote speech focused on the digital high-street health-check index developed by her and her colleagues.

A lot of attention was paid to the digitisation of the high-streets and particularly to the benefits that retail organisations will see if they develop an active digital presence. Steve Woolley, from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, highlighted the impact that the management of the personal data has to the patronage of retailers and the threats that may occur if a retailer misuse the data collected by the consumers. The Institute of Place Management was represented in the event by its Director Simon Quin who reminded to the delegates the importance of location and the physical place, and presented the findings of the High Street UK 2020 project.

Simon discussed how the evolution of the retail environment is changing, looking at various relevant trends as identified by the part-funded ESRC HSUK2020 research project. As well as talking about the 25 priorities for town/city centre vitality and viability, Simon also presented research findings relating to footfall signatures that identify different kinds of centres and provided the views of the Institute of Place Management on the emerging issues. Simon Pitkeathley’s, CEO of the Camden Town Unlimited, presentation on the use of the technology to facilitate the transformation of High Streets addressed how the visual appearance, the visionary management of the High Streets, the development of diverse anchors and stores, and the amount and quality of recreational space in a High Street – areas identified within the 25 priorities for the High Streets in the HS2020 project – provided evidence from Camden Town on how the physical place can be promoted to the consumers through the use of digital tools.

The delegates had the opportunity to ask their questions to the speakers and their answers provided valuable insight on the understanding of the instrumental role of the digital technology to place management.lower_high_street_2_670_230_84_c1_c_c_0_0_1

Victoria Baths – Local Asset or National Treasure

It’s my second trip to Victoria Baths. Not to brush up on my front crawl but to meet the Board of Trustees who are working to restore the baths to their former glory. For anyone that hasn’t visited it is an amazing place. Winning BBC2’s Restoration Series, has ensured a lot of remedial work has already been done to restore the baths to their former Edwardian glory. But there’s still a lot to do. The question is which bits to do first and how to pay for this?
My contribution to the solution involves embedding the baths back into the local community and concentrating on serving a local catchment. Whilst the baths are an asset to Manchester and the nation, they were built to serve a very local population.

In the days before the NHS people were regularly referred to spas and baths, to take the waters, for hydro-massage and all sorts of other programmes of treatments. The new nationalised health service preferred the more short-term and instantaneous approach of prescribing a pill (no doubt encouraged by the marketing budgets of the fast-growing pharmaceutical industry). Of course, we are now seeing a rise of preventative treatments and a recognition of the huge health benefits associated with “wellness”.

Victoria Baths has a catchment that could do with being more healthy; it is in need of its services. Not only in terms of permanent residents, but also the temporary ones in Manchester Royal Infirmary, which is only half a mile away.

The sheer scale and grandeur of the baths and the enthusiasm of the BBC viewers that voted to save them mean that they are a national asset. But if they are going to be viable then they need to attract regular users, not just occasional visitors.

You can see more about the plans for restoration by following the link below. I am sure the Board would also be interested in hearing from anyone who had expertise in the area.

http://www.victoriabaths.org.uk/

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Cathy, Professor of Shops

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Today saw the Queen of Shop’s review of Britain’s high streets.  Mary Portas’ brief from David Cameron was “to create vibrant and diverse town centres and bring back the bustle to our high streets”.  This call for Britain’s towns to be ‘vital and viable’ is nothing new, in fact this commitment has been incorporated into various strands of national policy for at least 15 years.   

So why is the future for towns looking so bleak?  And what can the Queen of Shops do, that three successive governments have said they’d do and haven’t?       

Mary says that her report is not about pointing the finger of blame but in order to solve problems, you have to fully understand them.  The factors that drive town centre decline are complicated, interlinked, interdisciplinary and paradoxical.  As Mary points out  “(w)hen I started my work on the review, I ploughed through a huge pile of previous reports about high streets and town centres and found so many good ideas which have simply sat on the shelf. Pretty soon I realised why. What I discovered is the complexity and diversity of the problems faced by high streets.   And I’ve learnt just how much of a complex web of interests and stakeholders are involved, many of whom have simply failed to collaborate or compromise”.  

Town centre decline is ‘a messy problem’, it doesn’t fit neatly into one government department; one of the reasons why the Prime Minister chose to ask a celebrity consultant to conduct a review rather than his own civil servants.  Mary makes a lot of sensible recommendations, she doesn’t ask why the majority of her recommendations have already been made and in some instances, put into practice, but have still not worked.

“It’s obvious, it’s all wrong and anyway they said it years ago”.   Most of the on-line comments about her recommendations fit this paraphrase coined by the respected economic geographer Paul Krugman, commenting on how his economic geography and city development work was received by peer reviewers.  Nevertheless, these comments raise interesting questions. If a solution is obvious and ‘old hat’, then what has stopped it being put into practice?  Likewise, if something is ‘all wrong’ then why is that? And is the proposal at one end of a ‘solution continuum’, with its antithesis by the default of logic,  ‘all right’?

Although there are 28 recommendations, they fall into six main categories:  getting town centres running like businesses, getting the basics right to allow business to flourish, levelling the playing field, defining landlords roles and responsibilities, giving communities a greater say and re-imagining our high streets.

They are a mixture of top-down and bottom-up solutions that can be summed up in one recommendation.  Change needs to be locally driven within a supportive policy framework.

But three successive governments have known this already – and backed a commitment to ‘vital and viable’ town centres.  We know many towns are failing, especially those that are near cities and coastal towns, where retail vacancy rates run at nearly 30%.  Even the ones that are ‘viable’ or, in other words, are economically successful, are not vital in the same way they were. Research by the New Economics Foundation identify 41% of towns and cities as ‘clone towns’ i.e. more than half their shops are chains.  It’s hardly surprising that people are not using their town centre if it is only offering them an inconvenient ‘copy’ of what’s available in other more accessible areas such as out-of-town superstores or larger cities, that have good public transport links.

One of Mary’s main recommendations is to create ‘town teams’ to take a more direct role in the day-to-day running of a town and also create a vision and long-term plan for the place’s future.  There are already, I would estimate, 1,000 or so places that have such a partnership.  It might not be formal town centre management or a Business Improvement District, but the principle’s the same:  A partnership of local stakeholders, made up of businesses, the council and local residents.  Town centre management has been in place in the UK for nearly 25 years but it hasn’t been properly supported.  We know it’s a good idea but how do we actually encourage and facilitate it? The Portas Review does not address this.

Mary also talks about communities having more say, again an issue highlighted in recent government reforms such as the Localism Bill.  Traditionally it has been elected council members and their officers responsible for places.  The very fact that so many places have lost their way, illustrates Mary’s comment that these areas have been mismanaged and ignored for too long.  But in my experience it is hard to challenge the status quo, unless the existing governance structures are open to such change.  People responsible for places need to have the right skills and knowledge – it is a really important job so they need to be competent.  If they need some training and support, this needs to be available and if they are not up to the job, they shouldn’t do it.  Again, whilst Mary calls for professional and inclusive place management, she doesn’t say how this will happen.  

Her other main and very important recommendation is to level the playing field.  In particular recommendation 14 states “Make explicit a presumption in favour of town centre development in the wording of the National Planning Policy Framework”.  This will be interesting as this gets to the heart of the issue; will a government introducing planning reforms to simplify decision-making by getting rid of such guidance and statements be prepared to introduce this intervention?  Local action is crucial, as high streets won’t fix themselves, but this effort has to be within a supportive planning policy framework.  So if the Government really wants to put ‘town centres first’ then by default, it means other types of development coming last.

Town centres are more than just shopping destinations.  They have been the heart of the community, in economic, social and political terms.  Of course, if a centre doesn’t have a population to serve anymore, then this decline should be managed.  But for those towns and cities that still have a catchment then global trends, such as increasing transport costs, an ageing population and, ultimately, global warming, means that politicians should be doing what they can today to ‘future-proof’ our towns and cities.  They offer a concentration of services with transport links and a ready-made ‘brand’ (i.e. the town or city’s name).  In the long run, it is so much cheaper to not reinvent the wheel.

White paper: Tabula Rasa or Toilet Paper?

The Government published its White Paper today outlining the policy for economic growth entitled “Local Growth: Realising Every Place’s Potential”.  To save you the trouble I have spent the afternoon reading it.  Nick Clegg’s introduction says that the Coalition Government is “determined to do something different” (p.3) so I was interested in reviewing the paper to see just how much is really new and what it is likely to mean for some places. 

First of all, the Government is planning to stop prioritising investment on the basis of region or sector.  In relation to region, this absolves the Government of its previous responsibility to “narrow the growth rates between different regions”(p.11).  In the main, this relied on public funding but the White Paper states that the UK economy has become “unbalanced and too reliant on public spending”. 

There is a 1.4 billion Regional Growth Fund, which areas that “depend too heavily on the public sector for jobs” can bid for, to create more private sector employment.  But this is only available for three years.  Is it really possible to create a private-sector led local recovery in our most deprived areas in just 3 years? 

The Resilience Ranking compiled by Experian anked Middlesbrough, Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent as the most at risk from public spending cuts.  I know these three areas very well, and even if they all got 1.4 billion pounds, it wouldn’t turn round decades of decline in three years.  Middlesbrough has had a £1.5 billion investment programme but it still has an unemployment rate of 6%, with some wards having rates as high as 17% (source: Tees Valley Unlimited).  The Public Sector provides much needed employment in these areas, I don’t see this as a ‘weakness’.  What’s wrong with having a few more teachers, doctors, police officers, park wardens etc. in places that need them? 

As for abandoning the prioritisation of certain sectors, that’s good news for those sectors that have been discriminated against, like the independent retail sector.  Whitehall has always looked down its nose at retail, as it doesn’t create wealth…it just moves it around.  Nevertheless, like the Public Sector, it provides a lot of employment and enterprise ‘training’. 

I presume the new Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs) will be free to invest in whatever sectors are locally important, rather than being told what to do by Central Government (and let’s face it, there are many more entrepreneurs that want to set up retail and service businesses than high-tech/bio-tech ones).  In principle, local decision making is a good thing, but it doesn’t always work. 

The local Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) only lasted 10 years.  Like the LEPs, TECs were employer-led, with two-thirds of the members of each TEC board having to be chairs or chief executives of private sector employers.  But they were disbanded because, overall, they were not effective at local labour force development, many were accused of “creaming off” government funds for initiatives not relevant to local employment needs and rather than being entrepreneurial and efficient many were “out of control” and overly bureaucratic. 

So what else is not new?  12 directly elected mayors for the 12 largest English cities.  As my friend Choco from Stoke said on my Facebook today “We had it in stoke, party politics comes into it too much and there’s too much power in one persons hands it’s been ditched here amid allegations of corruption, wasting public funds and overpaid non local executives so beware!”. 

This reminded me of the country’s highest paid monkey (see picture above), the mayor of Hartlepool, who was elected on his manifesto of free bananas for schoolchildren. Hartlepool is now one of the country’s best performing local authorities and many credit Stuart Hammond (the man in the monkey suit) for providing strong and honest leadership.  So it can work, but maybe it is because he is not a career politician that means he has done things differently.  I can’t image us electing Moonchester here in Manchester.

Are you still awake?  Only a couple more things to go now.  Tax Increment Financing.  This is when local authorities can borrow money in anticipation of increased future revenue from business rates that result from their investment. I think I’ve got that right.  It’s nothing new in the US, who have thousands of TIF districts.  But we have already seen what private-sector led investment has done to many of our towns and cities, identical-looking blocks of flats, carbon-copy shopping centres and yawn, not-another-glass-office-building.

Finally, the Government proposes to reform the planning system so that local communities can make their own decisions “changing the culture of planning so that the default position is in favour of development” (p.28).  Usually the only reason local people get involved in the planning process is to stop development – so I think this is going to be the hardest change to deliver.

So, on the whole the proposed changes to the planning system have the potential to have the most radical impact on local areas…..but I am not sure if it will be positive or negative.  The cutbacks in public spending in the country’s most deprived areas will set them back even further….increasing the gap between the South East and the rest of the country.  On the positive side, this White Paper does promote place management (although it doesn’t refer to the multi-stakeholder partnership approach to place improvement in such terms).  So, in areas where strong partnerships already exist the reduction in top-down management from London should ‘free them up’ to achieve their potential.  It takes time to establish these partnerships though, especially ones that are truly representative of all local stakeholders.

Key to regeneration and enterprise?

Good Morning Folks!

This is Ben here, Live blogging on behalf of Cathy at the New Statesman Fringe event for the Labour Party Conference.

First of all may I admit that the daunting prospect of a Monday morning Live-blogging task has been made easier by the good people in Starbucks (St. Anne’s Square) by providing possibly the two most dangerous words for me; Free & Pastries… Crumbs aside, I’ll endeavour to get your up to speed as and when the event kicks off.

If you want to keep up in real-time, you can merely refresh this image and the Internet faeries will do the rest.

If you have any questions for the panel please fire them over to me by

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Here’s the details folks;

Big brands: Key to regeneration and enterprise?
Starbucks & New Statesman Fringe Meeting at Labour Party Conference

And on the Panel we have;

Stephen Timms MP, Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury
The Rt Hon Stephen Timms is currently the Member of Parliament for East Ham.

Professor Cathy Parker, Professor of Retail and Marketing Enterprise, Manchester Metropolitan
University

Chris Ward, author ‘Coffice’

Susan Hinchcliffe, Regeneration and Partnerships Manager, Business in the Community

Chris Fletcher, Deputy Chief Executive, Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce

Alex Preston, New Statesman columnist (chair)

Looks like things may be moving soon, so I’ll get settled and get blogging 🙂

08:40.

Fire safety et al and we have kicked off, Spencer Neil (who incidentally, has misplaced his Yellow Notebook) introduces the panel. The danish pastries are going down a treat with what looks to be a room full of journo’s.

Cathy is Introduced as the ‘brightest of all of us’ which may not be far of from the truth at this time of the morning.

Steven Timms MP gets us underway with his take on branding with a quick pop quiz. “What is the oldest packaged brand, which is still available in the same packaging today”..Answers on a postcard to…(It is Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup)

After a resume of branding strategy and Steven’s ideas on the future, involving communities. He draws upon his experience in his constituency, East Ham where Primark moved in and he thinks added not only to the High St., but aided the community too (not sure Cathy wil agree with that last point).

Mr. Miliband gets his first mention of the morning as the new Labour Party leader will have to consider current partnerships with business and the wider community.

Next up is Susan Hinchcliffe from Business in the Community who tags onto the Rt. Hon Gentlemans brand quiz by adding that the brand in question hosts a number of social enterprises in its sugar refinery.  

Interesting point from Susan, in that big businesses don’t like to be the only player on the high st. and welcome competition from the independent retail sector. Susan refers to our own IPM members indirectly by asserting that Town Centre Managers struggle to engage with the big brands that straddle our high st.

09:00

And Cathy is up, kicking off with a reference to the High St Britain report.

Cathy talks about her interest and desire for proper place management on the high street and how successful tales towns up and down the country often have an existing board/initiative in place between the big brands, the independent operators  and the town’s top brass to manage these places.  Alex Preston is up next.

Alex touches upon the difficult issue of financing, comparing the borrowing power of  Diageo et al with the less favourable rates the government can borrow at.   After a brief introduction the final member of the panel Chris Wood gives us his two cents. Chris boasts an incredible CV from Boots counter worker to the founder of the doomed Friends Reunited among other initiatives. His book is on sale and he mentions that he works pretty much everyday, remotely from various coffee shops around the world and is a Foursquare efficiando.

The coffeeshop environment is explored from the entrepreneurs point of view as he suggests that

“If you are marketing to Mothers, spend time in a coffeeshop beside a school”

Interesting concept, although coffeeshop marketing may not take off as a moniker..

09:15

And the floor is open;

1. Patti from The Protection of Infant Health who thinks that we are concentrating on protecting big brands and ignoring the impact on real people…

-Cathy address this first wondering whether CSR is actually a misnomer, a big brand’s responsibility is to its shareholders before wider society. 

2. A labour candidate queries the panel on their consideration of awareness of corporate structure.

-Social enterprises are cracked open by Susan and while appreciating the scope for the good work they are doing, she points out that they are thin on the ground.  Cathy thinks that new forms of corporate structure, such as Community Interest Companies have a lot of potential to manage and regenerate areas.

3. How can charities get involved without compromising their charitable intentions?

Chris: Decisions about Fairtrade are not made because high st. brands really believe in them, it is ultimately because it makes them look good. SME’s alse use FT to hijack a bigger brand than themselves.

4. Is a new Sainsburys imact on small dying high st. town (Staffordshire-Moreland) a good thing?

Susan: Yes it is a good idea, but something must support it, like supplementary shops and cafes. This can be tackled by proper design and planning to create shops in between the Supermarket and the main part of the town.

Cathy: It depends if anyone is trying to leverage the impact of Sainsbury’s for the good of the High Street.   Coordination of effort from a place management body can achieve ‘co-opetition’…where large and small operators both compete but collaborate at the same time.

Alex: Some recent research in the US has found that whenever a Wallmart sets up out of town, the level of participation in political elections goes down.  Point being that there tends to be a disengagement within a community when they have to leave the centre to go shopping.

5. Mechanism to allow Big brands to put funding support into local charities/initiatives

-Steve refers to the ROI for governments investing which will result in lower offending rates. Idea of social returns is a very lucrative one for local councils and will be noticed at the highest level of government.

-True mutual partnerships are not just based upon cash, it may involve sitting on a board, attending meetings etc.

And that’s your lot folks, very interesting debate and I don’t think I’ve done it justice today as I can’t type as fast as the banter went back and forth.

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Good morning