talking trade
Monday February 4 2019 THE NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM, BIRMINGHAM
Speaking is one thing. Listening is another.
A controversial report has just been released stating that ‘it’s time to reshape our town centres’. Consultant Michael Weedoncomments on the findings.
Department stores, in particular, leave large empty frontages in prime positions and produce redundancies in large numbers. Their passing can do painful damage to their suppliers (some of whom will be reading this) and hurts neighbouring small businesses too, by weakening footfall. So, is the current story about the end of this
type of big retail? Well, it’s certainly true that comparison (non-food goods) stores are falling away as time passes. But they are almost all replaced by other types of commercial activity. Last year, of the 5,500-ish net drop in shop numbers - after a churn of 95,000 ins-and-outs reported by Local Data Company (LDC) [which collects retail location data across Great Britain] - more than 4,000 of those closures were multiples. One factor that unites many of the 2018 crop
I
n the same July week that the ‘Daily Mail’ ran one of its shouty “Save Britain's High Streets” headlines, the
Grimsey Gang rode back into town with an update to its 2013 ‘The Grimsey Review’ of the high street, which was a riposte to the Government-commissioned Portas Review carried out by retail consultant Mary Portas in 2011. Produced by a team of experts in
technology, regeneration, company finance and big data led by Bill Grimsey - the former boss of several big retailers including Wickes and Iceland - ‘The Grimsey Review 2’ offers 25 recommendations to help towns build themselves a better future. Reading the report brings on a strong sense
of déjà vu. Half a decade ago, ‘The Grimsey Review’ claimed that there was already too much shop space in the UK and that bricks and mortar retail could no longer provide the commercial foundations of the high street. That opinion hasn’t changed and it’s undeniable that with 50,000 properties lying empty out of half a million, there is a fundamental problem to be solved. This was already true before 2018’s ‘retail apocalypse’ headlines started to appear. Complete failures and desperate branch culls have put 50,000 jobs in jeopardy. What grabs public attention each time this happens, at least from the Woolworth’s crash in 2008, is the death of big chains. Everybody knows them, they have stores everywhere, and they look like bellwethers for the direction of change. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
36 |
housewareslive.net
is heavy corporate debt. It makes them more vulnerable to shocks in demand. Generally, though, the supporting information to ‘The Grimsey Review 2’ makes it clear that the financial strength of retailers improved overall between 2013 and 2017. This turn in the story is new. Even the LDC vacancy rate dropped gently over that half-decade. It twitched upwards in the first half of 2018, but not by much. So how do we reduce the number of empty shops that we have, without simply inventing fake businesses? By relaxing planning rules and the change of use process (to make it easier to convert high street premises to residential or other uses) in a locally controlled programme of retail reduction and repurposing, is among other suggestions made by The Grimsey Review 2. That will require, it argues (as in 2013), a formally established Town Centre Commission to build a vision and strategy for each place, with the Commission working with local government to make the plan a reality. At the launch of The Grimsey Review 2, the authors were at pains to stress that one size of solution does not fit all, although only one was on offer. As the LDC data on persistent vacancy rates included in the Review shows, all places are not equal. Large towns and city centres in particular
have longstanding voids at more than three times that of any other location type. In England there are more than 1,000 towns, but only 50 cities (51 if you include the tiny City of London) and most of the towns have not lost big stores, because they never had many of them, and they have lowish vacancy rates. So do the Grimsey Town Centre Commissions
•
HousewaresLive.net
have a useful application everywhere? One of the barriers to progress that the
report notes is the ‘complex layers of local government which are confusing and overly bureaucratic’. The Review simply poses the question: ‘can it be simplified to empower local communities so they can manage their own “place” more effectively?’ But in doing this, it bumps up against a bigger problem – councils have a far wider range of responsibilities than the proposed Commissions and ultimately, the democratically controlled institutions must be the ones in charge of local decision-making. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) work
in this kind of territory. They seem to be popular with businesses (as most get renewed by business voters) and they achieve the unlikely feat of achieving this while persuading businesses that it’s in their interest to cough up more in rates than they would otherwise have to do. The Review makes the interesting proposal that BIDS should be replaced with Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) ‘embracing all the stakeholders, occupiers, owners and service providers in an area including the local authority’. And this time around, again, the Review places some emphasis on that almost universally unpopular business rating system (almost universally, because the Treasury really likes it). It makes two broad suggestions for its replacement: ‘a land/area/property value or sales tax’. At this stage it’s important that any proposal
for reform or replacement is concrete, detailed and workable. Government will not replace a solid earner unless it’s certain that it will get an equally reliable source of income in return. The Government hasn’t said that there is nothing wrong with rates and it has recognised this by making some peripheral changes. But there is a stand-off while nobody comes up with a sure-fire winner of a replacement. The world is still waiting. ‘The Grimsey Review 2’ covers a fascinating range of subjects, particularly digital and online developments, that took up far less space in the 2013 iteration. But don’t take my word for it. You can read it for yourself at
https://www.didobi.com/wpcontent/ uploads/2018/07/GrimseyReview2018.pdf and make your own mind up. Unlike the Portas report, the Government
didn’t ask for this review. But speech is free, right? And the experts involved have many useful things to say. The question is, as last time, is anybody listening?
•
twitter.com/Housewaresnews July/August 2018
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40