Is the UK high street in terminal decline? How can it be saved?
Increasing wage costs, reduction in business rate relief, ever-rising commercial rents, domestic skills shortages – making it on the UK’s high streets is getting harder and harder for the small businesses that make up 99.8% of all British enterprises. And they’re not operating on a level playing field: online businesses face significantly different costs and challenges.
Meeting details
As the Government tries to unite UK business around its core growth mission, does it really understand the challenges small British businesses face, and does it have the answers and support ready to overcome them? What should it be doing now to drive its growth mission through our high streets and the communities they’re built on?
In a three-part session on the broad issues holding back high street regeneration, the BTC will question a range of small business owners and their associated industry groups to get a ground-level picture of operating on the UK’s high streets today.
The first panel will address the impact of national skills shortages which, particularly in the construction sector, threaten the progress of massive investment in infrastructure planned by the current Government. It is estimated that planned developments will require 47,860 additional workers per year from 2025-2029, or 239,300 extra workers over the next five years – but the current picture is of a sector with 35,000 unfilled vacancies, and that vacancy rate is rising more than any other sector. On the second panel developers and local authorities will speak to the blocks on development and how they can be lifted.
The final panel will consider the UK’s £62.6 billion hospitality sector – a key driver of the economy in every region of the UK, but facing a storm of cost and operational pressures. Pubs in particular, a cornerstone of communities as much as the economy, have been closing at an alarming rate: from 60,800 in 2000, to 55,400 in 2010, to 45,000 in 2024. The sector is the third largest employer in the UK but almost half these businesses – 99.7% of them small - cite labour costs as a threat to the bottom line. Evidence to the Committee has described the tax system as “structurally unfair to labour-intensive, low-margin sectors like hospitality”.
Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “Our high streets must not become museums of what we’ve lost - they should be springboards for the businesses of the future.
“Yet today small firms face higher costs, tougher taxes, and unfair competition. Too often the result is decline not dynamism.
“So the choice is clear: invest in the entrepreneurs who anchor our communities, or abandon the very foundations of local growth. If ministers truly mean to deliver a growth mission, they must start on the high street.
“By hearing from firms on the frontline, our Committee is determined to make sure ministers understand the reality on the ground - and we will use that evidence to shape a clear roadmap to help government get its growth mission right.”