Markets - survival needs passion not regulation!

I like markets - the picture above was taken at the Bradford International Market - an event I brought to Bradford and which attracted over 400,000 people to the City Centre in 2005. And it's not just the grand events like this one, it's also the everyday markets like that on John Street in Bradford - renamed the Oastler centre following a £5 million refit.

The Oastler Centre is a little microcosm of Bradford with stalls selling pie & peas, spices, Polish sausage, Croatian cakes, Italian bread, diced goat and yams. It does what markets have always done - it brings together people with a shared pair of objectives: to buy and sell good things to eat, to drink, to use and to wear. Moreover, in Bradford the City Centre markets are matched by outdoor markets in Shipley and Bingley, a covered market in Keighley and a selection of farmers markets the best of which, at Saltaire, has become a real fixture.

My interest in markets extends to having done a Masters dissertation on street markets - studying the economic impact of markets in Skipton (voted Britain's best market) and Mexborough. And like Nick Rhodes, former head of markets in Leicester, I found that markets make a real impact where they thrive. However, like Rhodes, I concluded that the economics of the traditional market business - the swag man and the rag man - no longer stacks up next to the cheap clothes of Primark or Matalan and the category killing of ASDA, Tesco and Morrisons.

Last week, the Communities & Local Government Committee of the House of Commons published its report into markets ('Market Failure? Can the traditional market survive?'). I have to admit to being underwhelmed by the work - the evidence is sound, some thought has gone into the work but I sense no passion for or real interest in traditional markets as a part of England's cultural heritage. There was also too much producer interest apparent - the market traders' association's desire to maintain their business through regulation rather than through competition and a stream of worthies from local government arguing for different types of new regulation and control. And I could scream at the prospect of a "national strategy" for markets under the malign aegis of the Department for Communities & Local Government.

The real lesson of recent - if folk were but to open their eyes and look -is that decline can be arrested when:

1. Local authorities stop treating markets as just another cash generator plugging a budget hole in one department or another
2. Markets operations are treated as a business rather than as a council department - and management is allowed to manage
3. Capital investment decisions are predicated on the revenue of the markets not the council's overall capital programme
4. Market traders are dealt with as tenants and customers of the market not as de facto owners and controllers

None of this stops the loss of business to discount clothing stores, on-line sales and the supermarkets - the wider retail market is driving that change. But it does mean markets stay attractive, attended to and places where people - from all sorts of background - want to go a spend some time shopping, eating, chatting or even just sitting and watching the world go by!