John Humphrys asks: can anything be done to save our high streets?
It has become one of the most common obituary notices of this century: the death of the High Street. And if not actually dead, then certainly at death’s door. The warning is clear: if we do nothing about it, pretty soon there will be nothing left apart from betting shops, charity shops, coffee shops and scaled down versions of the big supermarkets. And maybe a few nail bars too. The government says it is worried and brought in Mary Portas two years ago to tell it what needs to be done. This week Ms Portas appeared before a committee of MPs and was given a severe dressing-down by some of them who said she had not only failed to provide any answers but was exploiting her role to further her own career. Is that fair criticism? Can anything be done to save our high streets? And do you really care?
The facts are not in dispute. As I write, roughly 15% of all shops in the high streets are either empty or boarded up. And many of those that are still open are run by charities, all of them selling much the same second-hand goods, or supermarkets or betting chains. In some of our more rundown towns and cities it is, of course, much worse. There are more hoardings than window displays. The days have almost gone when every high street had several small shops selling assorted knick-knacks or the sort of clothes you might not find in big departments stores or those lovely little shops where the owner would spend as long as it took trying to find the exact screw you needed for your little DIY job. And nobody doubts that it will get worse. The Centre for Retail Research estimates that another 62,000 shops will close over the next five years with the loss of 316,000 jobs.
The big question is why and, as so often, there is no one simple answer.
It’s obviously not because we have stopped shopping. On the contrary we’re doing more of it rather than less. Consumer spending has gone up sharply over the past decade and much of it on the sort of things we would once have bought on the high street. The problem is that so many of us now automatically turn to the internet. One pound in every ten that we once spent in shops we now spend on the web. And that is rising relentlessly. It’s not hard to see why. Too many of us are pressed for time and we’d prefer to spend ten minutes browsing a few sites, making a few comparisons, and clicking the mouse than hours driving to the town centre, trying to find somewhere to park, failing to find what we want and coming home to kick the cat and swear we’ll never do it again. We might even collect a parking ticket into the bargain.
And that’s the other problem. Increasingly, local authorities are making it almost impossible to park in the town centre. Many regard motorists as juicy targets who will help fill the gaps in their budgets with their hefty parking charges or even heftier fines.
So it’s becoming more expensive for the shopper and also much more expensive for the shopkeeper. Simon Dunn is a well-known figure in the Cheshire town of Wilmslow, selling tempting chocolates of all sorts and attracting plenty of customers. Or, rather, he was. He’s had to shut his shop because it simply wasn’t making enough money – even though he was taking more than £200,000 across the counter every year. The problem was that by the time he’d paid rent, business rates, VAT and Wages, all he was left with was £100 a week. Hardly an adequate reward for the time and effort he was putting in. And that’s not an untypical story.
On top of all that, of course, there’s the competition from the giant retail parks. I live near the fairly upmarket Westfield shopping centre in west London. The place is heaving with big-spending customers. Parking is pretty expensive, but there’s plenty of it. In out-of-town centres it’s usually free. Even some of the big retail chains are closing their high street stores and moving into the shopping centres. How can a small shop in a high street compete? The answer is: most cannot.
Which takes us to that other big question. Do we care? Really care? I am old enough to remember the pre-supermarket days when my mother would use one or (usually) more of the local shops every day. She did so because she had no choice. The high streets were certainly thriving, but do we want to go back to those days – even if we had the time to do it?
Ms Portas and others have said local authorities can help revive the high streets by becoming more car-friendly and reducing the business rates and making life generally easier for small shopkeepers, but to many that seems a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. She wants town centres to return to the days when they were more than just somewhere to go (or, rather, not go) to shop. She wants them to become effectively social hubs: the beating heart of the town. They would offer services and not just shopping. There would be more crèches and cafes and, yes, nail bars as well as surgeries and sports centres. They would be areas where people would naturally gravitate and that, she believes, would make them more desirable places to live as well as to shop. She refuses to accept that our high streets are dead.
Her critics say she is living in a dream world and refusing to face up to the hard facts of modern life. One of them is Bill Grimsey, the former boss of Iceland, who produced his own report this week. He believes the high street as we have known it is finished. He says what is required is “a business approach to set out the vision, the objectives and plans to develop each area as a unique vibrant community hub with an economic blueprint.”
So… back to the question I posed earlier. Do you really care?
- How much use do you make of your own town centre, assuming you don’t actually live in it?
- Do you use its shops or simply click on a website or drive off to the nearest shopping centre?
- If you really do care, what do you think can be done to save the small shops?
- Whose responsibility should it be: the shopkeepers themselves for failing to keep up with the times or the local council for pricing them out of business?
Or maybe it’s your fault for shopping elsewhere.
