6 hours ago
7
Regarding your editorial (The Guardian view on high-street decline: a symbol of failure in a discontented nation, 3 February), saving high streets requires four things that the Treasury, the dead hand of government innovation, won’t like.
First, it requires an overhaul of the business rates system, and second, a new tax for online business. Third, it requires compelling landlords to charge reasonable rents.
Fourth, and finally, it requires local authorities the financial headroom to buy up vacant retail space. This ought to enable innovative community and business enterprises to flourish in what would otherwise be an overtaxed and overpriced rental market.
None of the above will suit the treasury nor a chancellor who has a history of gaffes. It’s not just the prime minister that needs changing. We need enablers to have their way.
David Claridge
Oxted, Surrey
Imagine a hobby centre instead of a shopping centre. It would have free table tennis and crazy golf. And paid-for craft classes and yoga. It would house Men in Sheds and there would be indoor football and badminton. Food courts would include a creche.
We need a new vision for town centres and tinkering with a failed system won’t work. Our supposedly free market is driven by financial not social value, forgetting that the purpose of wealth is happiness and health. It results in high streets of vape shops and nail bars, while online we spend beyond our means on throwaway products.
Tim Jackson described the challenges of a system based on material gain in Prosperity Without Growth, but said we still need the buzz currently provided by material gain. Increasingly, we also need to recreate the public spaces that used to bring us together.
Buzzing, social venues are popping up all over, such as the Games Room in Falmouth, crazy golf in Liverpool’s city centre and board game cafes around the country. At the same time, there’s an explosion of interest in crafts such as crochet.
Someone once said that Martin Luther King had a vision, not a 10-point plan. Sure, we need supportive taxation and business people to plan, but it’s the vision of a systemic change we’re missing. So let’s start with funding arts and innovation in schools, celebrate diversity and bring the creatives and people who care in from the cold.
Mandy Barnett
Burneside, Cumbria
I don’t know Newton Aycliffe, but when I read your description of the decline of the Beveridge Way shopping centre, I had a hunch. A quick look at a map confirmed my suspicion: not far from Beveridge Way there’s a large Tesco Extra and, naturally, a huge car park.
I suggest that wherever one finds hollowed-out shopping centres like Beveridge Way one will find not far away one of those grotesque temples to the motorcar that make a nonsense of aiming for net zero. Planning authorities are all but helpless in the face of pressure from the corporations who inflict them on our towns. Should councillors have the temerity to deny planning permission, corporations threaten them with expensive lawyers, eye-watering expenses to be paid out of the public purse, and the real threat of surcharge – something our Westminster representatives don’t have to face if they make a mistake.
A government with a spine would know where the immediate cause of high street decline lives, and would tackle that first, before any regeneration measures.
Rosalind Mitchell
Edinburgh
Your editorial on the decline of the high street doesn’t cover the damage done to public transport – and the environment – by the move of shopping from the high street to out-of-town superstores and shopping centres.
As a former CEO of a passenger transport executive in the 1990s and 2000s, it was very apparent that the new superstores – virtually all located away from or on the fringes of towns with large car parks – were designed around cars, with little or no consideration for access by public transport.
The switch by many shoppers from bus to car meant existing bus routes became less viable and many people from communities with relatively low populations lost their bus service altogether.
Of course, the result of these planning authority decisions meant many more local car journeys contributing to more pollution – and global warming.
Some towns have or are enhancing their centres by increasing pedestrian-only areas and only allowing buses and taxis into these areas.
If town centres are to thrive, much needs to be invested into making them aesthetically attractive and to give priority on the radial roads to those buses serving the town centres.
At the same time, there needs to be a financial incentive for businesses to locate there. Perhaps the chancellor might consider a differential between VAT charged on goods bought face to face and those bought online. Some of the resulting revenue could be channelled to local authorities to enhance their town centres.
Mike Parker
Director general, Nexus (Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive), 1994-2006
A number of people are bemoaning that if we don’t use our high street shops they will go (Letters, 2 February). This is totally fair. Is it also fair to expect people to shop in an area that costs more than online and is difficult to access (with expensive and difficult parking)? I don’t think it is.
If it’s cheaper and easier to shop elsewhere, we cannot expect people to buy consistently from the more expensive options (especially during this cost of living crisis).
So what do we do with our empty stores? I’d be deeply saddened to see the high street turn into houses and lose that sense of community at a town’s heart. I live in central Tonbridge and spend a large portion of my time in the town centre. I bought my home specifically so I could walk to the high street.
With out-of-town stores, supermarkets and online next-day delivery shopping, our high streets now provide us with a different experience to the one our grandparents required. We now work longer hours, spend our days looking at screens and communicate with loved ones remotely. Plenty of cafes, social spaces to spend time together in real life, places for families to bring their children – this is what our communities now need at their hearts. Places that bring people together and allow us to breathe, reconnect and space to look up from our screens. Places to fill our hearts and calm our overstretched minds. These could be cafes, restaurants, play centres, pubs, community spaces to hold events, groups and classes.
If the government thinks about what modern communities need and rethinks business rates to accommodate these spaces, our towns can continue to grow outwards without losing town centres at their heart.
Holly Ware
Tonbridge, Kent
