Reviving Britain’s ailing town centres will need radical action and planning, according to a new report.
The Distressed Town Centre Property Taskforce — set up after retail guru Mary Portas’s review of the High Street — claims the scale of the problem is so deep that many town and city centres need rebuilding from the gutter up.
Unlike previous inquiries by local authorities and retail organisations the 13-month taskforce examination of Britain’s shopping streets was undertaken by property investors, landlords and bankers – in effect the people who own and finance much of our retail and other commercial property.
The biggest hurdle to a revival, they found, was the “over population” of England’s high streets. In the past four decades, retail floor space has increased by around 43m square metres — the equivalent of building nearly 300 Bluewater Shopping centres every year since the early 1970s.
“There’s still a need for vibrant retail, just less of it,” said the taskforce chairman Mark Williams.
Nor, he said, could we blame the problems on the global financial crisis. “Over the past 12 months, it has become increasingly clear that waiting for so called ‘normal’ economic growth to return is unviable. Many more town centres will have embarked on a course of terminal decline,” added Williams, of retail property firm, Hark Group. “Solutions will vary from place to place, but for the overwhelming majority, a smaller retail core is necessary and alternative uses for centres like housing and leisure need to be found.”
The report offers five key recommendations:
As we emerge from the financial crisis we need to accept that traditional funding for town centre remodelling is “no longer fit for purpose”, adds the report. “There is a huge amount of private sector funds available to regenerate town centres,” said Williams. “But it requires scale and planning (not) an ad hoc approach to fix the odd shop.”
The Government, which funded the research, is now examining the findings. “This is an interesting report with some really interesting things which we need to look at,” said the Housing Minister, Brandon Lewis.
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