Amazon didn't kill the high street and taxing online sales won't save it

We were on Gordon Terrace at Saltaire on Monday to pay a bill, have some lunch and do a little shopping. This street is as close as you'll get anywhere these days to that idea of a 'traditional' high street. Gordon Terrace has a greengrocer, a baker, a butcher and a grocer (OK it's a Co-op) those stalwarts of that high street of old plus a shoe shop, ladies' boutiques, a great menswear store and assorted delis. Even on a Monday lunchtime when rain is promised (and delivered in spades while we were in the greengrocer) the street is buzzing and busy. OK it's not perfect but there was just the one empty shop and a distinct lack of betting shops, tanning parlours, cheque cashing agencies and other such common features of today's high streets. It demonstrates that, given the right demographic and a benign parking regime (free short term on-street parking) the high street can succeed. Let's also note here that the busiest places were the cafes and restaurants - leisure an dpleasure rules the day on the high street. Saltaire is, however, pretty much the exception not the rule when it comes to high streets. And some folk seem to think we can make everywhere like this by the action of government - those folk are wrong.

The reasons for the decline of the traditional high street are many fold and date back a very long time. The first part of the decline came as a result of the success - based on choice, convenience and price - of the supermarket. Back in the days before supermarkets (Ken Morrison opened his first at Girlington in 1961 the year I was born - so that long ago) places like Cullingworth had a myriad of shops providing all the things those supermarkets came to provide, just not with the same range or the same low prices or indeed under one roof. The supermarket with its scale, distribution chains and efficiency resulted in tens of thousands of small grocers, fishmongers, greengrocers and corner shops closing down. They didn't all close suddenly overnight but gradually as folk retired, sold up, cashed in or, sadly, went bust.

At about the same time technology hammered another nail in the high street's coffin as the fridge freezer began to spread. This meant that women didn't have to shop nearly every day (something that helped make it easier for those women to go out to work, have a career) but could stock up for days ahead and, instead, spend their time on something more pleasant than dragging a heavy bag back from the high street. And those families also began to have cars too meaning they didn't have to use the shops in the nearest high street but could scoot down to Mr Morrison's grand store for what was now their weekly shop. The little shop in the village (or on that row of suburban shops at Bywood we used as kids in Shirley) couldn't compete with the car, the freezer and the supermarket so they slowly went from the high street.

By the 1980s the supermarket was joined by other stores in big sheds - category killers they were dubbed as they targeted hardware, gardening, toys, furniture and linen (in the USA books, cars and clothing were on this list too). Instead of going to that slightly intimidating store run by the man in a brown coat to buy some screws, paint or tools, people drove out-of-town to a sharper, cleaner, friendlier (and cheaper) store offering more choice but a bit less personal service. But if what you wanted was a hammer, personal service probably got outvoted by price and choice, so you went to B&Q. And the same went for bedding plants, toys for the kids at Christmas, settees and duvets - out-of-town offered more choice and a better price.

All of this decline, you might call it the decimation of the high street, took place before anyone except a few physicists had access to the Internet. For sure there was mail order but, unlike the USA where distance selling was a boon to remote places, the thing mail order companies offered that wasn't easily got in the British high street was credit - the liberalisation of finance in the 1980s bashed a huge hole in businesses based on the never-never. By the 1990s all the 'big book' mail order businesses were declining (the closing of mills and factories with female workforces didn't help as mail order relied on agents to sell through these places) while more nimble direct-to-customer mail order like Damart was thriving. But these latter weren't affecting the high street as their modus was selling niche products (thermals, outdoor clothing, plastic storage and so forth) - many of these business, Lakeland Plastics being a good example moved from mail order into high street retail.

By the time the Internet arrived most of the traditional local high streets with butcher, baker, greengrocer, grocer and hardware store had gone. Some survived by diversifying - butchers and bakers built businesses that depended as much on selling lunchtime sandwiches as on loaves of bread or gammon joints - but where this wasn't possible the businesses went. And they went most quickly in places where people benefited most from cheapness - poorer communities.

At the same time as all this, the out-of-town shopping centre arrived - Gateshead's Metro Centre, Meadowhall, the Trafford Centre, Lakeside, Bluewater. And these - again - offered a bigger range, more choice, a nicer environment and keener prices than the traditional town centre. The first to lose out here was comparison shopping on that traditional high street - ladies' wear, shoes, children's clothes all began to struggle as people found travelling to the mall more convivial, no less convenient and certainly cheaper.

All of this - and there's a lot more that could be said about how technology changed consumer behaviour, drove down prices and increased choice - is a long-winded way of explaining why Ruth Davidson and others who blame Amazon (and even more daftly, Amazon's tax bill) for the decline in high streets. In the simplest of terms high streets are dying because fewer consumers are frequenting those high streets. And, to make matters worse for small centres, the people who have deserted these high streets fastest have been the people with more money who have more ready access to transport and therefore take advantage of the bigger choice and better price offered by out-of-town shopping.

Unless the sales tax for online sales is so onerous as to force consumers to pay higher prices on the 'traditional' high street (assuming what they want to buy is available on that high street) the effect will be merely to make things a little bit more expensive for everybody without changing what consumers do in any notable way. It's good politics to talk about how it's not "fair" that Amazon doesn't pay high street rents and business rates but this is an argument for reforming business rates not an argument for taxing Amazon (I'm steering clear of the economists' point that business rates are a tax on the landlord not the tenant as it's contested and hard to explain to a retailer with a tax bill). It may also be true that we need to reform corporation taxes to make it harder for the likes of Amazon to use international trading to hide profit (again I'm staying off those pesky economist arguments about how corporation taxes fall on workers, customers and shareholders not the company itself).

Trying to blame a complicated social change like the decline of high street retail on one competitor (and a competitor that didn't even exist for most of the time the high street has been declining) is ridiculous. What we should be asking is why places like Gordon Terrace in Saltaire work so well while other places don't. Perhaps we need to think about which high streets need saving (or have the demographics and current range needed to survive) and which don't. There used to be at least 30 shops in Cullingworth covering everything you might need - there are now just twelve and three of those are hairdressers. Taxing online sales won't save the high street - asking what makes a high street work (the clue is in the second Grimsey Report where, in effect, he says the answer's leisure and pleasure not old-fashioned retail) is a much better question.

We have too many shops and probably too many high streets. I know this is a hard point to make and no comfort when we're talking about the centre of a Lincolnshire market town but it has to be said. There's a case for looking at reforming rents, at a business rates system that more directly falls on landlords, and at further changes to corporation taxes to reduce their burden on small business. There's no case for a tax on sales - over and above VAT - as this is just making things more expensive for us consumers. It may "hit" the bad boys of Amazon but it will also damage thousands of small businesses selling everything from gin and tonic marmalade to classic car parts through online methods. The result of this sales tax wouldn't be salvation for the high street but higher prices, closed businesses and another bundle of cash for government to squander on pet projects in town centres or subsidising failing businesses.

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My speech on Bradford City centre to Politics in the Pub

For those of you who missed last night's Bradford Politics in the Pub event, here is my short speech about the regeneration of our City centre and the Council's current proposals. We were asked "how do we solve a problem like Darley Street?"

"Forgive me for not answering your question. I really do think it’s the wrong question for all that we’re rightly concerned about the future of that street.

It’s more important, I feel, that we think about the longer term, about the future of the high street and the role of City Centres like Bradford.

When big and successful centres like Leeds and Manchester are starting to question the size of their retail footprint – about shrinking the centre, as it were – it seems silly of Bradford to think in a different direction.

The idea that retail alone – or even in large part – can deliver a future city centre is, I fear, delusional. Those things in your pockets and handbags ensure you can buy stuff at the flip of a finger and have it delivered to your door – city centres will never compete with this shopping offer.

We need a different answer. One that works for Bradford.

14 years ago, Bradford asked Will Alsop to provide a city centre master plan. I posted the result – or at least the video that accompanied the plan – on the Politics in the Pub facebook page – if you’ve not seen it, it is easily googled.

Once you got past the teddy bears and blobby architecture, Alsop’s plan was genuinely radical.

So genuinely radical that we ignored it.

Alsop proposed an anti-development masterplan. A completely different take on a city centre. One that played to the uniqueness of Bradford as a place and to the city’s challenges with land values and investment.

Alsop said ‘knock down the ugly stuff, the results of Wardley’s 1960s redesign of the City Centre, and replace it with a park.’

That was pretty much it. For sure there were bits of detail. Some debate about whether there should be no planned new development or just very little.

It’s time for us to look again.

What are centres for?

Here’s a list from American ethnographers Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart:

“…dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends.”

You might care to add to this list but I do know that, when Bradford City are promoted to the Premiership it won’t be celebrated by buying stuff on Amazon – the flags, parades, banners and beer will be here in the city.

Imagine that in a place that’s like a park? For a fleeting moment Bradford has a glimpse of that dream.

But we put it away. Searched instead for “high value demographics”, “enhanced land values”, and “new investment profiles”. Development bollocks.

Bradford doesn’t have the values right now to deliver shiny retail, grade ‘A’ office space or high quality market housing. So simply moving bits of the city about – fixing Darley Street by shutting down the main generator of footfall in the ‘top of town’ seems to be simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So let’s do to the top of town what Alsop told us to do – turn it into a park. A destination. That might just work. It seems right now a better bet than waiting for millions of private investment in housing that probably isn’t going to arrive in Bradford city centre any time soon."

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Rents and the death of the high street

Aaron Renn reports on the arrival of a mustard shop in New York's Upper West Side:

Maille is a supermarket brand of dijon mustard. It’s a product of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch food and consumer products giant. You may not know Unilever, but you know their brands, including Hellman’s, Dove, Lipton, and even Ben and Jerry’s.

This particular location provides mustard tastings, and sells dijon in a variety of flavors not typically available. I believe they also have some vinegars. I was once needed some dijon and purchased a jar of their regular flavor for $7 – which is $3 more it sells for at the grocery store a few blocks away. They apparently charge as much as $99 for a jar of black truffle mustard.

Shortly before this description Aaron had noted the departure of his local (Upper West Side) Starbucks following a rent hike to $140,555 per month. As he points out you've to sell a whole lot of coffee just to cover a $1.7m rent.

So why the mustard shop? And how is it that Unilever (fresh from scrapping with Tesco over Marmite) feel able to justify forking out something similar for a shop round the corner from that defunct Starbucks? The answer to this question is central to how we see tomorrow's high street. I've written before about the shop as part of a brand marketing strategy:

Just as Diageo wants high net worth customers in the Johnny Walker House, the future high street success wants high spending, high end customers - the every day buyer can shop from his computer and have it delivered or collect from the Post Office. In town retailing becomes an event, an orchestrated, animated marketing promotion. The customers walking into you shop are there because you've invited them - to a product launch, an anniversary, a preview. They're dressed up to party not slouching round the shops in jeans and an old t-shirt.

What Aaron Renn is saying, however, is that because the cost for the mustard shop rent is coming out of Unilever's marketing budget, it's a drop in the ocean. Moreover, that rent isn't set against sales (even though you can pay $99 for some truffle mushroom) but against the objectives set by the brand managers - measures of equity, voice and share are just as important as sales. After all the supermarket's more likely to buy the product (and maybe pay a little more for the product) if it's the mustard with the flash shop in the posh Upper West Side.

The effect of this is to push up rents and to push out actual retailers. With ever more sophisticated home or click-and-collect delivery systems the ability of real retailers to compete is diminished. The high street as we know it is already pretty ragged but what this tells us is that the future of town centres - even in wealthy places - is as a billboard rather than a shopping centre.

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So what exactly is wrong with Costa Coffee? Why national chains are important to the high street

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Some long while ago the New Economics Foundation wrote a report where they coined the term 'clone town':

The report shows how retail spaces once filled with a thriving mix of independent butchers, newsagents, tobacconists, pubs, bookshops, greengrocers and family owned general stores are fast being filled with faceless supermarket retailers, fast-food chains, mobile phone shops and global fashion outlets. 

The report has been remarkably influential - it combined our like for traditional high streets with something that pretended to be economic analysis. From out of this idea - an a host of subsequent reports - has come a new model for the high street where words like 'sustainable' and 'resilient' abound, and where jolly bunches of community activists and local 'independents' create delightful people-focused places. It is quite idyllic and, if you go to well-healed market towns in Oxfordshire or North Yorkshire you see the model in action.

One such place - in Devon as it happens - is Totnes. I wrote about how the local planning and development agenda has been captured by a group of green activists calling themselves Transition Town Totnes. There was even a petition to the town council setting out local concerns around this capture:

While no one in the Totnes has voted for TTT to dictate town policy, it has enormous influence over town planning policy and the future economic direction of the town. No one in the town voted for TTT to run policy, and it is quite wrong that Totnes Town Council took the unilateral decision to become give us the label of a Transition Town. In fact, if TTT continues to implement its damaging policies it will succeed in turning Totnes centre in a ghost town and make all our lives far more difficult. We want choice, not just TTT's choices.

The whole thing came to a head because Costa Coffee submitted an application to open a coffee shop in the town. There were petitions against signed we're told by 12% of the towns residents as well as by folk from nearby communities like "Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kent, Leeds, London, Manchester, Norfolk, and Surrey, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and even Morocco".

The upshot of all this was that, despite getting its permission (quite rightly since planning is concerned with the use not the ownership), Costa decided not to open up in Totnes. And, as a result, Totnes lacks that little bit extra choice and variety. However, my question is rather to enquire what it is that is so wrong with Costa Coffee that its very presence in a small Devon market town would drag that place down?

The main protagonist here is a chap call Rob Hopkins who believes that his rather peculiar idea of 'resilience' is more important than that pesky thing called choice:

"Choice" is one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie words which can surely only be a good thing, can't it? We all love "choice". It is, of course, ultimately your choice whether you buy your coffee from an independent local business or a chain such as Costa. But would opening a chain in a local economy introduce more choice, or ultimately lead to less? Would it lead to job creation, or to greater job losses, to job displacement? Would the chain support the local bakers, farmers and services that enable more money to cycle locally and give a local economy its robustness?

Here we have the essential argument of the transition town people - that businesses like Costa Coffee don't create jobs and use low cost suppliers from some place other than the 'local' economy (however defined). The idea of resilience - robustness in the quote above - is, for Rob and his pals, predicated on limiting choice through a model of local protectionism. And, of course, as with any form of protectionism, this model results in higher prices and less choice. For high income residents of these market towns such things are affordable but for the poor or unemployed the supposed resilience comes at a cost since they are less able to afford what is on display in the stores as a result of the transition town policies.

I'm not so sure that this argument is right. It rests on two beliefs - that the local multiplier is significant and that substantially more of the money spent in an independent retailer 'cycles locally' as Rob Hopkins puts it. Both of these arguments are open to challenge. Firstly the multiplier, while an important concept in economics, is challenged as a measure in local economics because of leakages and the difficulty of measurement.

There is, however, a more fundamental objection - this is that any benefits from more money staying locally are more than wiped out by the higher prices that results from excluding chain retailers. The New Economics Foundation multiplier model (LM3) doesn't take account of higher prices as it only measures spending downstream. And these higher prices represent an opportunity cost - the consumers' money isn't going into other local spending as they are having to pay those higher prices. A complete assessment would subtact this opportunity cost from the calculated benefits from the LM3 calculation.

The second objection is to the idea that substantially more money remains in the 'local economy' where it is dominated by independents. After cost-of-goods the biggest costs for a retailer are the premises and the employees. We can't assume that the rent is recycled, energy costs certainly leave the local economy as do any repayments on business loans, and there is a significant chunk of taxation (VAT and business rates in the UK). There's nothing to indicate that the employee in a Costa is less likely to spend locally but again most of that employee's costs - tax, rent, energy - leave the local economy.

Finally we need to challenge the idea that "the reweaving of local food webs, community-owned enterprises, a culture of entrepreneurship focused around community resilience" is somehow a stronger local economy than one which is linked with the wider national and international economy. When disaster strikes distributed and networked chains are better able to respond. Here's the example of Wal-Mart after Hurricane Katrina:

It is no accident that Wal-Mart had a strong, measured response in the aftermath of Katrina. Numerous local and state government and law enforcement officials credit the company with providing the first relief efforts in the devastated region, days before Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Red Cross relief operations began.

“Wal-Mart was a lifesaver here in the city of Kenner,” says Phil Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb. “They mobilized and brought food and water when others couldn’t or didn’t know how to get through. They provided anything we asked for when FEMA or no other federal or private organization did. And for that, we are deeply grateful.”

This large business with an international distribution network could respond - had there only been independents such a response simply wouldn't have occurred. And while coffee shops are less important in a disaster than grocery stores, this is a reminder that the approach to 'resilience' promoted by the Transition Towns movement is a false one - not only is it less able to respond to crisis but it is also predicated on higher prices and less choice.

There may be many reasons why Rob Hopkins and his friends don't want to drink in Costa Coffee (although beyond under-strength coffee and bad biscuits I can't think of one) but there is no reason for them to gang together so as to prevent people who might want to drink their coffee in big white cups on an off-centre saucer from doing just that. And suggesting that tourists wandering into Totnes will head to Costa rather than one of the delicious little independent cafes the town is so proud of says very little about those businesses' marketing and service offering (probably unjustifiably).

The 'clone towns' report was important and influential. But we have taken the wrong message away from it especially in a changing retail environment. Since 2005 we've had a massive recession tracked by the explosive growth of on-line buying. As the economy recovers it's unlikely that we will see a return to the sort of high street we saw before 2005. In some ways this is a good thing because we get to treat the town centre as a destination, as a place for events rather than as merely somewhere where we go shopping. But chain restaurants, bars and cafes are just as much part of the future mix as are a variety of creative independents.

Right now the only places that can sustain the sort of retail mix that Totnes is celebrating are either wealthy market towns, posh suburbs or places with a large visitor footfall (and the right sort of visitors). Most places are a very long way from being able to indulge in the slightly snobbish exclusivity that is implied by the Transition Towns idea - indeed many high streets and town centres are more challenged by what to do with a growing number of empty shops (not to mention proliferating betting and borrowing establishments).

Instead of the negative, Stop Costa, Stop Tesco, Stop Wetherspoons, approach places should look to the barriers to new initiatives - setting up bazaars and markets, encouraging busking and peddling, promoting street food and pop-up bars and using the public spaces as a stage for events that help attract people into the town. What we must stop doing is arguing that national businesses damage local economies when there is precious little evidence to make that claim.

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Burgers, bookies, borrowing and the holiday tan - nannying fussbucketry reaches the High Street

A healthy high street - complete with 'unhealthy' sugar!

The 'Health on the High Street' report from the Royal Society of Public Health starts off well with a statement that, for once, actually has some connection to actual public health rather than the regular nannying fussbucketry we associated with the profession:

A healthy high street environment is one in which there is clean air, less noise, more connected neighbourhoods, things to see and do, and a place where people feel relaxed. The architecture of the high street would be such that it fosters active urban design principles including pavements, seating, shade and shelter. Above all the high street would provide a safe environment where the public don’t live in fear of crime,violence, harassment, or accidents. 

It's hard to take issue with this as an argument. Firstly it's absolutely about the public realm, the environment in which people go about our everyday tasks and in which we celebrate the good things of life. And this is the concern - if there is one - of public health. But just as importantly these things - less pollution, places to sit, low crime and a mix of indoor and outdoor - are what make for successful town centres.

Sadly though the Royal Society of Public Health doesn't stop with saying high streets should be clean, green and safe. Turn the page and that nannying fussbucketry hits you in the face. We are presented with yet another judgemental dismissal of things other people (mostly other people from lower social classes) enjoy.

The businesses on a healthy high street would not only enable basic needs, including access to affordable healthy food and affordable financial services to be met, but would actively promote healthy choices. There would be access to essential services whether that is health services, cultural amenities, places to be active, leisure centres or green spaces, for example. A healthy high street would also create opportunities to minimise harm whether that is ensuring that health is included as a condition for licensing and a consideration for planning consent. 

We have arrived at the crunch. The health high street isn't about a clean, green, safe space at all but is rather about public authorities - through licensing or planning controls - deciding what sort of business is fit to grace our town centres. To justify this particular branch of health fascism the Royal Society of Public Health has cooked up some of its own pseudo-science - what they call 'the Richter scale of health'. This scale (unlike the actual Richter Scale) is an entirely subjective, opinion-based scale. A business can score somewhere between -8 and +8 on the basis of researchers allocating a score from -2 to +2 against four 'areas of health': encourages healthy lifestyle choices; promotes social interaction; allows greater access to health care services and/or health advice; and promotes mental well-being.

Now you'll have noticed that most high street retailers will score zero (since this, our researchers tell us, is what is given where 'the category is not relevent to the outlet'). Your typical shoe shop, assuming we're not running a campaign on the health impact of high heels, is entirely neutral on matters relating to health. Mostly because it's a place where you go to buy shoes.  And the same goes for building societies, charity shops, clothing shops, hairdressers and hardware stores.

As a measure then this is worse than useless. Unless of course your objective is to use your status and authority (this is a 'Royal Society' after all) to promote a given political agenda around your intrusive and judgemental definition of public health. It will come as no surprise to discover that the 'research' identifies betting shops, tanning shops, payday lenders and fast food takeaways as the dark evil on the high street, the causes of unhealthy high streets. And the healthy stuff - leisure centres, health centres, pharmacists, health clubs, museums and pubs (the inclusion of which will be giving various in the Church of Public Health palpitations - in the authors defence they did manage to find a picture from inside a pub that didn't show anyone actually drinking*).

The authors then go on to set out in lurid detail the evils of gambling, burgers, fake tans and high interest borrowing before settling down to create a little ranking of the most and least 'healthy' high streets in England. Unsurprisingly the resulting ranking show that high streets in northern towns where people like a flutter and eat take-away kebabs are much more unhealthy than high streets in the nice, comfortable market towns where the researchers and their friends are likely to live. This time it's Preston that gets the devil's mark resulting in the usual slew of sneering broadsheet articles and this from the local paper:

OFFICIAL: Preston has unhealthiest city centre in the UK

Followed by people from Preston agreeing:

Coun John Swindells, deputy leader of Preston City Council, said: “The results of this survey mirror our own concerns. Indeed the Royal Society for Public Health is campaigning to allow local authorities greater planning powers to deal with this issue. It is something the council, along with 92 other local authorities, has and will continue to lobby the Government for."

This is the saddest thing about the report - not that a bunch of London-based nannying fussbuckets has produced 'research' designed to show the awfulness of northern cities and towns but that the leaders of those places fall over eachother to say just how much they're doing to make Preston more like Salisbury (as if that was either achievable or desirable). If places like Preston and Middlesbrough - number two in this particular ranking of evilness - are doing badly it's got more to do with the relative poverty of the place than it has to to with whether the council has powers to ban betting shops or fast food takeaways.

Finally the report goes into full 'something must be done' mode listing a veritable cornucopia of fussbucketry. This opens with planning and licensing controls including specific powers around health as a reason for refusing a licence (having been nice about pubs earlier in the report they include alcohol licensing in this demand) as well as a general power to stop 'clustering' - presumably that wouldn't apply to Bond Street or Saville Row.

We then get assorted nudges and bans (including the entirely stupid proposal for a ban on displays of vaping products) before the entirely predictable for differential business rates, mandatory health warnings and limits on stakes all while repeating the familiar litany of lies about these products and services ('crack cocaine of gambling'). All of this is deeply depressing and reminds us that too many - the leader of Preston City Council for one - are taken in by this New Puritan agenda of public health.

This research (truly awful and unscientific research) will be rolled out again and again - by the LGA, by the BBC, by assorted groups of fussbuckets - to support the argument for ever more restrictions on who can do what and where. It will be accompanied by the continuing sound of moaning as high streets continue to decline - with the sort of outlets derided here forming the last vestiges of a town centre economy. And rather than look for a completely different approach, we'll trog along behind the health fascists and control freaks as they nail the last few nails into what's left of our high streets.


*Although the eagle-eyed will note that it's a very old photograph as it contains images of smoking!

Whose streets and squares are they?

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American streets are not places where ritual, either religious or secular, is easily performed. Only in cloistered communities, set apart from the flows of American life, is this possible, as in the Orthodox Jewish communities of New York and Los Angeles. There, people (importantly) walk to temple, and participate in an “interlocking series” of rituals throughout the Sabbath. During the numerous Great Awakenings in the United States, open space was transformed into religious space through its key ritual, the revival; but this was a temporary transformation, and has not survived in contemporary ritual.

This is a reminder to me that, in much of our nations, we do not own the streets. The streets belong to the government - local or national - and are managed and policed so as to facilitate smooth flow of people and vehicles rather than as a shared space available to all.

I was asked recently what - or rather who - some people needed to contact to hold a little march (or, in this case, a dog walk). I pointed out that they didn't need permission to walk round a public square but that the Council and police would rather they were told about the event. But this is not always so:

Following negotiations with the Metropolitan police, the Greater London Authority and Westminster city council, the organisers of the Time to Act march – which is supported by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, the Stop the War Coalition, Global Justice Now, Avaaz and Friends of the Earth – have been told the police will no longer facilitate the temporary closure of roads along the agreed route.

What we need to understand here is that the police have decided several things - firstly that people cannot walk along the highway, that those highways must be 'closed'; secondly that because of this the people who wish to use the highway need specific permission to do so; and lastly that they must pay for the privilege. The article seems most bothered about the matter of paying but for me this is the smallest of the state's offences here - the real offence is to say that you cannot walk with others along what we used to call the "Queen's Highway" without permission from the agents of government.

I've felt for a long while that the manner in which public authorities control the use of highway represents a persistent restraint on liberty - from banning 'A' boards and street seating through to the hounding of buskers, chuggers and street performers. There's a view - widely held among those who like the idea of 'town centre management' - that only permitted activities should be allowed, that anything loud, lewd or controversial should be stopped and that enforcement of imposed rules is the reason for having that town centre management.

The truth is - as Barbara Ehrenreich observed - is that our authorities have always feared public gathering, whether it's the protest march, the football crowd or simply twenty lads on a stag do.

Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites.

In the end mankind's gregarious nature wins - we still gather together to celebrate and we share the space of celebration with others who celebrate something else. It's your birthday and you're dragged into town for a good night out. There you'll join folk out celebrating getting engaged, having a new job, leaving an old job, winning a football match and even the mundane fact that it's Friday so no work tomorrow. Sometimes there's something that links us all together, a shared event - watching our team parade the cup round the streets, seeing in the New Year, starting the Christmas season with a light show - but most days the events our private. But they are private events played out in a public place - shared with the world by using the space we all own.

Or so it should be. Ask the preacher who gets arrested because some passer-by was 'offended', the campaigners moved on because they didn't get permission for their stall, or the marchers stopped from making their point to those in power for want of the proper pieces of paper allowing such a protest. Yet political discourse - protest, campaigns, even debate - is as much part of that public place as anything else. In Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart's work on the ethnography of America's main street they list the reported activities and politics is right in there - the reasons people go down town:

Other consumers and retailers describe social activities on Main Street, which they associate with a variety of experiences, including dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends.

This activity shouldn't need a licence, special permissions or the oversight of police or public guardians - we should let people get on with it, smile at the silliness and enjoy the fact that people are using a shared space to live their lives. After all, whose streets and squares are they?

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Taxation without representation - haven't we been here before? Labour and saving the high street

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The Labour Party wants to extend the scope of things called 'business improvement districts' (BIDs) - organisations of local businesses that are (subject to a poll of local businesses) able to levy a charge on all businesses in an area for the purposes of improving that area. These BIDS are popular with high street regeneration folk and are usually managed by a private business organisation.

It seems that, flush with the success of these organisations, Labour's resident 'experts' on saving the high street have come up with a wheeze to make BIDs even grander:

An advisory group created by Labour to consider the future of the high street has recommended that it looks at introducing a new levy on residents to fund a major expansion of Business Improvement Districts, which manage local areas.

In its report, which has been seen by The Telegraph, the High Street Advisory Group recommends “diversifying the application of BIDs, including the ability to assess property owners and residents” and says that “new tools will need to be explored which diversify income streams”.

Now there are two things that are utterly wrong with this proposal - even if you set aside the nonsense that yet another tax is the solution to anything. Firstly, taxation is bad enough when government is doing the levying but surely allowing a private organisation to levy the tax runs totally against the principle of good governance? And secondly, don't we have at least a tenuous attachment to the idea that taxation goes hand in hand with representation?

We could talk at length about high streets but these proposals represent a step beyond local businesses agreeing to a local levy (and for the record, I find the idea behind BIDs coercive and hard to defend) - every tax should be levy by a body over which those being taxed have some control. This is a fundamental tenet of democracy and if you ignore it the result is the dumping of tea in the harbour.

However, and in the interests of bipartisan policy-development, I have a wonderful solution to the dilemma. It doesn't require any new legislation or any new organisations. This solution has been tried and tested over many decades. It has its limits and its problems but most of the time it works. It also meets those tests - representation, democracy and public accountability - that we should apply to bodies that levy taxes. These are hundreds of these bodies across England ranging in size from a few folk meeting once a year to large organisations employing full time staff.

The bodies are called 'parish councils' (although you can choose to call them town, community, village or local councils too).

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Taxing supermarkets won't save the high street...but it will stop the high street saving itself

The 'supermarket levy' campaign has been around for a while and, thanks to the thoughtlessness of local politicians in assorted places, has now reached the national media:

BBC News has learned that Derby City Council has called for the right to bring in a levy as a "modest" effort to ensure supermarket spending "re-circulates" in local communities.

Some 19 other local authorities back a so-called "Tesco tax" on big retailers, which could raise up to £400m a year.

The premise for this is that supermarkets and other out-of-town retailers are to blame for the decline of town centres and, when we're asked, we all say town centres are really important. Except that we don't do very much of our shopping there any more. And the reason we don't shop there is because town centre shopping - at least for every day purposes - is inconvenient, inconsistent and often expensive. We have to get into town, park (often at considerable cost) and then lug our tired bodies round assorted shots that may or may not have the things on our list.

The 'supermarket levy' is promoted by an organisation calling itself 'Local Works'. Here's something about it:

Local Works was the coalition campaign for the Sustainable Communities Bill, originally set up by the new economics foundation. The campaign was successful when the Bill became law - the Sustainable Communities Act - in October 2007. Since then Local Works, as a part of Unlock Democracy, has been promoting the Act and urging people to get involved and government to implement it properly.

What nef did was to cobble together this coalition on the manifesto of 'localism' and the Sustainable Communities Act was sold to us on the basis of positive proposals to improve town centres and local communities. It is pretty sad that the usual green left wibble about the malign affect of supermarkets has been allowed to dominate the campaign's agenda. A fine idea that local initiatives shared can prompt national action has become just a campaign for a tax on food retailing, a campaign that won't save the high street, won't make people use independent shops but will impact on food prices in the places where most people - and especially less well off people - shop.

Seeking to rescue the traditional town centre by this route merely replaces trade with subsidy. The independent retailers and town centres become dependent on the money that flows from the levy. This doesn't really make those businesses and those centres viable, it merely acts to ossify a failed model. The future for high streets - as I have said many times before - doesn't lie with mere shopping but with being places of leisure and pleasure. This probably means fewer shops and smaller centres but it also means a different approach starting from what people want - not defined by opinion polling but rather by what people actually consume.

In the widest meaning of these words, the successful town centre is about the event, about theatre and about occasion. Some of the events are grand, some might be political or campaigning or even smaller and localised. But most of the events and occasions are personal and private - Susan's 40th birthday, the end-of-season night out for the football team, a reunion of old university friends or perhaps just a walk round town with mum and dad. The best town centres are the ones that provide for these events and occasions and not the ones harking back to a time before most people had cars and fridge freezers, a time when shopping was daily and a real chore.

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Brandon Lewis gets it right on fast food!

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We have a new hero:

Britain’s struggling high streets need fast food restaurants which are ‘massively important’ to millions of shoppers, a Tory minister has claimed.

Brandon Lewis, the new high streets minister, said it would be ‘wholly wrong’ for the Government to try to ban junk food from town centres.

Absolutely right. Brandon even used some old fashioned insults to describe proposals to ban or otherwise prevent fast food shops on high streets - "socialist" he called them.

Fast food simply isn't the problem (and never has been). Most people don't live on McDonalds or KFC for the simple fact they can't afford to - if they're obese it's because of what they've got in the fridge and in the cupboards at home.

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The London Assembly has lost the plot on housing...

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The vote was unanimous:

Cross party assembly members backed a motion urging the mayor to fight the policy which they believe will result in sub-standard residential developmentsas planning authorities will have ‘no control over the size and mix of dwellings, nor over provision of infrastructure or standards.’

This all sounds super doesn't it but for the fact that plenty of Londoners are already living in sub-standard properties. Including ones with entrances like this:

So London's politicians - who seem more bothered about finding ways to stop housing development - would rather this continues than give up a little bit of control over housing, in this case converting shops into homes without the need for a change of use permission.

Apparently, this policy will destroy 'high streets' - presumably ones that look like this:

So London's politicians would prefer to have empty shops rather than homes for Londoners?

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Leisure and pleasure not tax and regulation - how to transform the high street

 

Next week Bradford will be debating a motion calling for a levy on 'large retailers' the revenue from which would be used by the council to do wonderful things so as to sustain high streets and town centres. It all seems very good:

That the Secretary of State gives Local Authorities the power to introduce a local levy of 8.5% of the rate on large retail outlets in their area with a rateable annual value not less that £500,000, and requires that the revenue from this levy be retained by the Local Authority in order to be used to improve local communities in their areas by promoting local economic activity, local services and facilities, social and community wellbeing and environmental protection.

But the truth is that this proposal represents - in terms of regeneration - a dead end. Not only does it make an arbitrary distinction in terms of business, essentially "big shop bad, little shop good" but it completely misses the reasons why, firstly, shops out of town are popular and secondly what drives change in high streets at the minute.

If we are to 'rescue' - or is the right word actually 'transform' - our high streets, we aren't going to do it through levies, taxes and regulations, through the use of governmental main force to order the way in which we shop. If we want great centres and high streets, we should start by looking at the ones that work and with asking why this is the case.

Above all though we need to stop thinking in terms of high streets as merely places where we shop. Two American academics (one an actual shop owner), Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart wrote about the 'ethnography of an American Main Street':

Other consumers and retailers describe social activities on Main Street, which they associate with a variety of experiences, including dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends. Many informants also refer to social interactions between and among retailers and consumers.

We recognise this description but miss out on the fact that all this meeting, playing, talking and enjoying takes place somewhere other than in a shop. We treasure these places because they are places of leisure and pleasure but just as importantly we are actors in the production of that pleasure. For sure, we want the meal in the restaurant to be tasty and the service to be smiling and easy but the real pleasure of the meal is in the company, the buzz and the interaction with our friends.

And we also know that such pleasure - the crowds, the buzz, the interaction - doesn't have to be in the high street. Julian Dobson writes about a London canal and concludes:

It’s easy on the eye, even if you wouldn’t want to investigate the canal bottom or some of the shrubbery too closely. It’s a place for wildlife. Sometimes it’s cultivated, with little gardens and pocket parks punctuating the path. The contrast with City Road couldn’t be greater.

The Regent’s Canal is a high street because it attracts people in the way that a good high street attracts people, whether it’s full of bars, shops or public buildings. It works because it’s a stage, a promenade and a garden. If we want our traditional high streets to have a future, that’s what they need to be too.

Despite these observations - academic and journalistic - public authorities remain wedded to direction, to tax and regulation rather than to creating the spaces that work. These won't all be havens of peaceful pleasure like the Regent's Canal - that's not everyone's leisure and pleasure - but they will be filled with people enjoying themselves, celebrating life and consuming the bounteous wonders that the world contains for our pleasure.

If there were no shops in the high street but it was filled with happy, smiling people out enjoying themselves would that not be a success? I think so.

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Punishing shopping centres won't save the high street

Skipton Market - my kind of shopping but not to everyone's taste

I like Julian Dobson’s stuff; he talks sense about the challenges facing town centres (although his prescriptions and solutions seek to put a finger in the dyke of consumer behaviour rather than try to direct its flow). But sometimes his heart is too firmly on his sleeve and he loses the grip on common sense.

So it is with his reaction to the claim from the British Council of Shopping Centre that their collections of emporia are at “the heart of the community”. Rather than considering that this signals worry rather than arrogance, Julian launches into his “I hate shopping centres” mode and proposes a nonsensical set of ideas for those shopping centres to “prove” their central location in “the community”.

Let’s look at them:

“...every shopping centre operator should sign a public Community Reinvestment Pledge...”

Why just the shopping centre Julian? Why not the artisan baker, the trendy clothes boutique and the ‘independent’ coffee shop? How are they any different and shouldn’t they be making this same pledge? Truth is, of course, it’s just another cost to the business – means higher rents and these mean higher prices. But I guess Julian doesn’t about that as he’s not on a budget.

“...ask their tenants to pay staff a living wage: one that gives people enough to live on, not a minimum wage.”

Sounds great doesn’t it! And the same applies – those retailers not in the shopping centre should also pledge to pay a living wage surely? Again though – although doubtless Julian will be swiftly on with talking nonsense about the regional multiplier – the main effect is to increase costs (wages are one of the two big retail costs and the other, rent has been put up by the “Community Reinvestment Pledge”). And higher costs mean higher prices. Great idea!

“...they should dedicate a portion of every centre to community or civic space.”

Another impost that means higher rents – it all sounds great but why should a commercial venture do this? Out in Julian’s beloved high street, they aren’t clambering all over each other to give away space to ‘community or civic’ uses. They’re quite rightly looking for paying tenants and, if the Council wants a library or the community group a meeting space they can pay the rent just like everyone else does.

Right now it’s a pretty tough time for high street retailers – the country’s economic problems and the rapid growth in e-commerce and m-commerce make it ever more difficult for traditional retail models to succeed. Dreaming up passive aggressive pseudo taxes for shopping centres – punishing them for being “bad” – is a recipe for more closures, more job losses, more business failure and more empty parades with the occasional crisp packet or flyer doing a passable impression of tumbleweed.

What annoys me most about this anti-retail (or rather anti-certain kinds of retail that we disapprove of for no obvious reason other than that they are national businesses) approach is that it will do nothing to change the decline of high streets or the loss of independent shops. There is a rather patronising, middle-class, guardian-reading pomposity about the “save the high street” rhetoric. It reminds me of folk who criticise McDonalds while tucking into their £20 of hand-formed, lamb burger in some trendy gastropub. It’s not the bad diet but a sniffy, “that’s a bit common” attitude – and hating shopping malls is much the same.

I don’t like those malls but that’s my preference so I seek out other places. Yet millions of people do like shopping malls, visit them often and get real pleasure from shopping in those dreadful national chains. I know this because that’s precisely what millions of people do every weekend. Who am I – or Julian – to criticise that choice, to say that our preference for trendy shops in windy alleys is better that shiny shops in glittering malls?
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Tesco's strategy, town centres and the future of the 'high street'

Tesco have announced a significant shift in their development strategy:

After two decades of aggressively buying up land and building stores, the company is understood to be keen to scale back on opening new, large, out-of-town hypermarkets in favour of using the capital to invest in its existing store portfolio and expand its Express network of convenience shops.

It also wants to grow its click-and-collect service, which allows shoppers on the Tesco website to pick up goods, especially non-food items, from their local supermarket. At the last count just 500 of its 2,800 shops were able to offer the service.

Some observers see this as something of a response by Tesco to the fact that their seeming quest for world domination has faltered a little in the last year or so:

The move by Tesco to concentrate on its smaller shops follows its disastrous profit warning that it issued in January, the first in more than 20 years, and which wiped £5bn off its share price.

I’m not so sure – indeed businesses like Tesco have a much longer time horizon than the headlines in the FT or the short-term response of the markets. What the firm is doing is shifting its emphasis away from huge out-of-town emporia, from grand hypermarkets selling everything a shopper could possibly want under one roof, to a strategy founded on the fact that everything the shopper could possibly want is there on the internet.

And what shoppers seem to like is the idea that there’s a convenient spot nearby where they can pick stuff up from. For some, that convenient spot is the front door step but for many the ‘click-and-collect’ idea works pretty well and is rather better than the ‘drive-five-miles-park-push-a-trolley-round-a-store-queue-at-a-checkout-load-car-drive-five-miles’ approach.

In business terms the supermarkets have to switch to on-line selection and shopping because that’s what customers want. And this means that the focus will shift to smaller, local convenience stores as well – great news for secondary retail locations but more bad news for the high street.

Over the short-term, this leaves the supermarkets with a headache:

Analysts, however, warned that though Tesco should initially save money by scaling back its investment in large stores, it would have a long-term problem on its hands.

Jonathan Pritchard, analyst at Oriel Securities, said: "What are they going to do with all that land? Some of it can be reverted to residential property, but it has more than £1bn-worth of property in its landbank."

Worse still, supermarkets stopping building huge hypermarkets is pretty bad news for the regeneration industry – just think how many grand schemes are predicated on the willingness of those supermarket businesses to stump up enormous off-site or mixed use investments just to get the hyper-store permission.

It seems to me that the rate of change in retail is increasing and, as the economy clambers out from the basement, we will not see the recovery in the high street that people seem to expect. The ubiquity of the smart phone and the convergence of the TV and computer will mean that only those who choose not to have access to on-line shopping won’t have access.

We need therefore to think more urgently about the “high street”, about our town centres. And to do something other than call for more “powers” or new rules – although this appears to have escaped the LGA:

Town halls in England and Wales have called for more powers to tackle High Street takeaways, strip-clubs and bookies, which they say could damage local economies.

The problem is that, right now, these are the only businesses that are prepared to take those shops – the alternative is an empty shop that generates zero footfall. And one guesses that the takeaways, strip clubs and bookies (it used to be building societies, then it was charity shops, followed by pound shops – the chain of high street opprobrium continues) do actually generate some custom or else they wouldn’t be there would they?

The problem of the high street isn’t a problem of planning, it is a consequence of changed consumer behaviour. Since we can’t change consumer behaviour, we have to find a new role for the town centre – probably a smaller high street with fewer shops. A place – I’ve said this before – focused on leisure and pleasure.

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