Q17 The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee. This is the second evidence session of our new inquiry into high streets in towns and small cities. Today we welcome as our witness, Sir John Timpson, who is the chairman and owner of the Timpson Group. He also chaired an expert panel on high streets and town centres, which was commissioned by the Government in 2018. Sir John, welcome and thank you very much for being here.

We will ask you a series of questions. I will ask the first one, which is a gentle opener. How do you define a high street in a town or a small city, and what would you say is its purpose?

Sir John Timpson: It is all different things in different places, and if you want to see what its purpose is, you go back to where it started. It was where people met to do trade and where towns became marketplaces, because people came in from wherever they lived and joined on a market day, or on many other days. Generally, it is described as a place where people meet to trade and people go to trade with them, and it can be all shapes and sizes. I will leave it at that, because it evolves so much over time. It has changed an awful lot during my career. It is completely different now from what it was in 1960 when I started.

The Chair: What would you say are the main differences over your long career?

Sir John Timpson: The thing that made the biggest change was in 1964, I think it was, when resale price maintenance came to an end. That made the difference and allowed shops to charge whatever they wanted for branded goods, and it opened the way for supermarkets to have price advantage over the high street. That, combined with the spread of use of the motor car, led to a lot of out-of-town shopping. This is where a lot of people make a mistake, because it is out-of-town shopping that has made the big difference and not so much online shopping. Online shopping replaced something that was already there, mail order. If you line that up, okay, it is obvious that online shopping has made quite a difference, but it is nothing like as much as the retail parks and out-of-town supermarkets.

Q18 Baroness Andrews: Good morning, Sir John. I wanted to ask you about your report, because it is a very proactive, very interventionist report, and the Government have followed through on quite a few things. What do you think has worked really well, and what are you disappointed with, if anything, in terms of a response?

Sir John Timpson: It is too early to say. Quite a lot has been followed up, with a High Streets Task Force, and money has been spread about, but I am looking to see a town, a city, that does something that other people can copy. It is clearly too early for that to happen anyway, because it is quite natural that at the start people will run about doing a lot of investigating and having lots of meetings and so on. It is only when towns and cities change that something really worth while happens, and I am yet to really see that. There have been examples over the years, such as what has happened in Altrincham—as cited in the report—the place where I started work, and which has made a remarkable difference there, going from one of those places with the highest percentage of closed shops to somewhere that is thriving.

There are other things going on, such as in Slough, where the big shopping centre has been knocked down and half changed into accommodation. But there is a danger that, to please everyone, the advice will be spread too thinly. The Government are talking about 100 or 150 towns. We only need five—maybe 10, but five would be enough—really great examples where everyone else can learn lessons and do what is right for their particular town.

There is no one policy fits all for this. Every town should be developing itself in the character that is right for that area. We do not want Northampton to be the same as Stafford and for everywhere to look like Altrincham. That is not what we are after. We want them to have their own character that is right for their community, but if somewhere has made major changes to the centre of their town or city and it has worked, it would be helpful to see. As yet, it is too early to say.

Q19 Baroness Andrews: There will be other questions from parts of the committee drilling down into the task force and so on, but I want to ask you about something you addressed in your report. You spoke of barriers and how you intended to advise on how to reduce or demolish barriers to good development and so on. You are saying that for towns and cities you have not yet seen the model you may be looking for, so to what extent are those barriers still there, and to what extent are they proving so much more difficult than you may have thought?

Sir John Timpson: One of the biggest barriers to people changing things and to movement in shops has changed, and that is rental values. They started changing in 2008. Lots of bad things happened in 2008 with the financial crisis, but as far as we as retailers are concerned, one of the good things that happened for once was that, after years of being under the thumb of the landlord, we have been on top of the argument since then, so rents have not been a problem. Rates continue to be a big problem, and that is a barrier.

The other thing we have found to be a barrier is that the definition of use of various properties is collapsing. One of the real problems is that you look at a town or a city and say, “They must be doing badly”, because there are lots of empty shops, but that is not necessarily because trade is bad; it is because there are frankly too many retail premises. It is pretty obvious that you do not need as many retail premises in a town now as you did years ago, before there were retail parks and supermarkets. Those retail premises need to be changed into premises for something else, which will liven up the whole town or city.

The Chair: Has the introduction of Use Class E, which Robert Jenrick introduced when he was Secretary of State, not opened it up, because that has more or less meant that anything goes?

Sir John Timpson: Yes, well anything is going. That is what I am saying has got rid of that barrier. The one thing that remains a real problem is business rates.

The Chair: We can talk about that at some stage.

Q20 Baroness Janke: Good morning, Sir John. My question is to do with a longer-term vision and approach. The report, as Lady Andrews said, talks quite a lot about intervention and lots of government funding at the moment. What about a future, long-term approach? What do you feel will be necessary for these high streets or town centres to sustain themselves once they are not getting quite as much government funding?

Sir John Timpson: It is difficult to talk long term. In my business, I am courageous enough to write a chairman’s report for 15 years from now. It is an exercise I use to try to make myself ignore what is happening now and to project the range of things that could happen. It is not easy, and if you are talking long term for the high street, you have to be thinking more like 50 years.

Baroness Janke: Even 15 would be—

Sir John Timpson: Well, yes, but as far as the Government’s role in all this is concerned, I am quite clear that they should just be helping, enabling, not necessarily throwing a lot of money at it but clearing the obstacles that get in the way. No way should the Government be telling people what to do. I have used the phrase “upside-down government”, which is the way it should work.

The long term is always determined by people’s habits and supply and demand. We should not be trying to sustain a high street exactly as it is now, because that is not what people will want in 15 or 30 years’ time, as shown by what has happened during my lifetime. We should also make sure that we can have a high street that the population of that moment wants and, in particular, we should always provide a community hub for the people who live around each cluster of population.

Q21 Baroness Janke: My experience has been that once you have projects of community partnership in particular, they do not necessarily endure. You have lots of enthusiasm from the community to start with, but as things go on those projects do not necessarily have the dynamism and energy or the visionary leaders to continue. How do you think about injecting that kind of energy for the future and sustaining it after government funds become less available?

Sir John Timpson: Inevitably, change in a town centre will be a change of the mix of things that happen there, which means a change of what the properties are used for. It will look different. Over time, sure, you will be very dependent on the people who live there, the people who have shops, the people doing the shopping, and the people who are running the area, and that is bound to change.

I hope that one of the things that will continue is that people who are involved in shopping in town centres will still allow people to meet people. One big disadvantage the high streets have had over the last 30 years is to do with access, car parking and shopping. One of the great advantages that a high street could have over the next 30 years is the ability to provide people with face-to-face services. With the IT that is being used, progressively customers are doing the work for retailers: you can see that when you go to the supermarket and you have to pack for yourself—all that sort of thing. If you go to some good retailers, you can still meet people, and people will continue to go to high streets for the social interaction as well as the purchase of goods and services.

Q22 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: My question follows on very neatly from that, because it is about how shops on the high street can evolve to respond to changing customer preferences. Do you have any examples of particular shops that, in your view, have done that successfully? Bearing in mind the point that was made about varied uses in high streets, are we going to see a shift from retail to activity-based high streets, and how should retail businesses respond to or cope with it?

Sir John Timpson: Who has really evolved? I will leave our own business out. We all have to evolve. The thing we did originally, which was shoe repairs, has all but disappeared. If you look at what people are wearing, we have had to evolve.

I greatly admire the way Greggs has evolved its business. It might not be what you think of as the idea high street retailer, but it has been fantastic. It has evolved the product, the way it does it and everything. Some new businesses are still growing and developing very well, such as Cook, which does the ready meals. Hotel Chocolat was a very inventive business that occupied a space that seemed to be disappearing. It is also quite nice to see an older business re-evolve, such as M&S, so it is possible to evolve. I am trying to remember the second part to the question.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: It was about whether we will see a shift from retail to activity-based high streets.

Sir John Timpson: For a start, you are already seeing a shift on the high street towards more service-based retailers, which we are one of, and there are nail bars, hairdressers and barbers. They are things that you cannot do online, and service retailers desperately need lots of other shops around them because they need the customer flow to do the business we cannot do on the internet. You are already seeing many more cafés and various hospitality venues. There will be more entertainment and medical services going into the high street. There will be a whole range of things that you might not view as retail but that will be occupying premises.

I was thinking only yesterday that one of the things we are losing most of on the high street is not shops but banks. I do not think Wetherspoons can open enough branches to fill all the banks that have closed. We have to find other uses for banks, and there are a lot of inventive things happening. There are entertainment activities happening on the high street—things that my grandchildren do, such as escape rooms. There is a whole variety of things that are not shops in the traditional sense but will go into the high street.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: What do you think will be the drivers of that concept of having not just one but several, all supporting each other in a way because of the footfall? Are there enough drivers to ensure that that happens where there is a will? What would be a barrier to that developing?

Sir John Timpson: The driver is always entrepreneurs who see a new way to, frankly, make money. It is whether they see that a particular place has enough potential customer flow, and that builds on each other. At the weekend I went to what was Battersea Power Station for the first time, and there you have a whole new retail environment, because lots of retailers saw that there were lots of other retailers and they could get together and generate demand.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Did you like it?

Sir John Timpson: I did. I thought it was interesting that there were so many retail chains of the same quality—we were not asked to open a shop there, incidentally—that fitted very nicely together. It has demonstrated that there is still an awful lot of life in the future of physical retail.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: And good advertising, of course. They promoted themselves extraordinarily successfully.

Q23 The Chair: Are there good and bad new entrants to high streets? I am thinking of, say, estate agents, which sort of plague the high street. “Plague” is the wrong word, but there are quite a lot where I live in Kensington. Now, an estate agent is essentially a deadening frontage, because people do not go in and out of estate agents in the same way they go in and out of many other shops, including even nail bars and such like, because you have a very distinct purpose in going to see an estate agent. It is not really a retail activity but they like having a window on the high street. There are other potential new entrants that have, again, that deadening effect that closes things down. They are not shops you go into to pick up a bar of chocolate or whatever it might be. Do you think there are threats there as well?

Sir John Timpson: First, I would rather have an estate agent next to me than an empty shop. An estate agent might not have many people going in and out, but it does have people looking in the window and it creates customer traffic, which is fine by me. I would not like to decry anyone who is willing to pay the rent to take premises. You might not particularly want to be next to some of the retailers.

The Chair: No, and having done planning in Kensington and Chelsea for a long time, we definitely had a distinct view that there were certain sorts of occupants of high streets and more minor retail clusters that had a deadening effect; they do not attract a lot of footfall. Yes, you look in the window as you are passing, but you do not say to yourself, “I’m going to go down to the high street now to have a look in the window of the estate agent”. When you get there, you do not open the door, you do not go in and have a cup of coffee, and you do not necessarily meet people. That is only an example.

Personally, I think there are certain uses like art galleries which are quite similar; very few people actually go into an art gallery because it is such a narrow market. You can get streets that are taken over by something like estate agents and the vitality has gone out of them. We had really quite distinct policy views on this; I am not making it up out of a sense of prejudice against state agents.

Sir John Timpson: Last week I was on a trip around Lancashire and I went to Chorley. Our shop there—it is a Max Spielmann, not a Timpson—is next door to a Turkish barber. Then there is a nail bar, then a tattoo parlour, and then an Indian takeaway. I thought that was fine. It was busy, people are trading, and we are trading very well, so I would not turn my nose up at anyone next door. Incidentally, they do not have many art galleries in Chorley; it is not the sort of thing that happens there.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Everywhere now has a Turkish barber.

Sir John Timpson: Yes, and a busy one too.

Q24 Viscount Hanworth: I think you have answered much of my designated question, but I will rephrase it. Do you envisage any conflicts of interest between or among contenders for innovative uses of the high street and existing shops that have been there for some time?

Sir John Timpson: If you have an established business, there is always a slight danger that someone will come in and take a bit of it, which is what competition is all about. I am trying to think of examples.

Viscount Hanworth: Are they aggrieved at newcomers?

Sir John Timpson: Well, Hotel Chocolat knocked Thorntons off their perch. It has taken over the business that Thorntons had. There is always a chance, especially if you do not keep developing your business, that someone will come in and do it better. The Body Shop did not develop for all sorts of reasons—sadly, a lot of it was related to Anita Roddick—but the concept and culture of being environmentally friendly in providing cosmetics is very much alive. I saw that in some of the occupants at Battersea Power Station; there were lots of that type of shop. You always have to create a better version of yourself, because that is the way you survive.

Q25 Viscount Hanworth: Do you have a firm opinion of the necessary balance of interests and composition of the high street? You have shown yourself to be very flexible about what transpires.

Sir John Timpson: You have to keep up with what people want to do. I could have mentioned Next as another business that has developed extremely well. The share price of Next went down to 2p or something at one point—it very nearly went under—yet it is one of the most well-developed retailers around. It has done what we have also done, which is to have a mixture of high street and out of town—as well as online, in its case—which is a sensible thing to do. That does not mean that you are retreating totally from the high street.

Viscount Hanworth: Next is a clothing store, is it not?

Sir John Timpson: Yes, it is clothing and some other things, but mainly it has always been a clothing business. It started in the 1980s. Overnight, it took over Kendall & Sons, which was a chain of 110 shops that it converted, at maybe 10 a week, from being a seller of raincoats to being this very innovative fashion retailer called Next, and it became a brilliant success.

Q26 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Good morning, Sir John. Are there certain business models or tenancy contracts that are particularly conducive to a thriving high street? I speak to youngsters about this topic all the time, and they are much more interested in the destination. They like the idea of pop-up, so there is churn. I imagine that if you run a business you are not interested in churn in the same way 16 year-olds are. They think a high street is a place to hang out and do things. With all those differing and competing wants from customers, are there certain business models, particularly around tenancy, that are conducive to boosting the high street?

Sir John Timpson: The concept of a pop-up shop, or a continuation of a thing that has disappeared far too much, is a market. M&S started as a market, and a lot of these businesses started with a market stall. It gives innovative retailers the chance to start on a very low level of exposure in terms of running costs, and it does not cost very much to set them up from a capital point of view. The lower the cost and the more flexible the tenancy is, the better, as far as I am concerned.

Since Covid, there have been lots of new retailers entering the market, and quite a lot on the high streets, because the rents are a lot lower and they can have a go. That is where the future will come. Some of the biggest retailers in 30 years’ time have not yet been invented, and they just about all start with one shop. Boots started with one shop, and M&S was on a market stall. Having charted the history, they all start with someone opening a shop. The more people can do that, the more likely they are to have a flourishing high street with new things coming along.

Q27 Lord Bailey of Paddington: From a policy point of view, is there something local authorities could be doing to make that start point easier? Is there something the Government can do to make the start point of a business—that leap of faith—simpler, from a business model point of view?

Sir John Timpson: I do not think it is something government should be doing. Government should be encouraging and helping to make it possible. Local authorities could do quite a lot to encourage the market areas that have been declining. Generally, wherever you go, there are very few markets. There are a few thriving markets—Swansea and Hereford—but they are old-fashioned. We want modern markets. Local authorities can make those areas part of the new plan for the town centre.

Q28 Baroness Eaton: Lots of people so far have mentioned to us balancing the variety of interests that arise in the high street. Before I was here, my experience was in local government, and I remember chairing a regeneration company trying to regenerate a city and realising that unless you have all the players singing from the same hymn sheet it becomes very difficult. You say that strong leadership is essential for the creation of high streets, but who do you think should provide that leadership, and how should it be provided?

Sir John Timpson: In the natural way of things you might think it should be someone who emerges from local government, but it is not.

Baroness Eaton: I would not necessarily think so.

Sir John Timpson: No. You need a certain sort of character, and there are a number about. We have one right now: the driving force wanting to regenerate a particular football club who is very jealous of my football club having gone ahead of it.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: For the same city?

Sir John Timpson: I am a Manchester City supporter. There are lots of these people about who put their energy into helping to develop a hospice, for example. I have friends who have done a lot of work to develop boys’ clubs, youth zones, in the area—someone who has the interest, the commitment and the vision to be a Mr Accrington, or wherever it is. Accrington is indeed a place that is ripe for this sort of development. You cannot invent these people, but that is the sort of thing that will happen.

Baroness Eaton: I see that. It is the formality of what that person can do with the varied interests if they have no particular status other than being a very worthy and good person. You cannot just turn up and say, “I’m enthused”, and work with people. I understand that, but it is the concept of how they do it.

Sir John Timpson: It is force of personality. They do not need a formal status. They create their own status through their own personality, determination, persuasion and meeting lots of people. You know the sort of character I am thinking of. It is certainly not me.

Baroness Eaton: Some council leaders can also have that drive.

Sir John Timpson: I am not saying they do not. I would not rule out any member of the council doing it, but I do not think you should—

Baroness Eaton: Assume that is the route.

Sir John Timpson: Yes.

Q29 Lord Mawson: You said a bit about the role of government, and I want to dig a bit further into the proper role of government. You talked about enabling and removing obstacles in an upside-down approach. I quite like that, but one gets a real sense of how fragmented many of the government responses are to this whole area of work. We have just started digging and already we can see how fragmented it is. It would be good to have you say a bit about that.

Do the Government know what they are doing in this space, and do they really understand why it is about the five examples? I agree with you: it is not about the 120. Lots of government schemes are interested in the 120 and ignore the detail of the things that work, hence nothing ends up working.

The Chair: Can we keep it to questions, Andrew? Do not answer your own questions. We would like to hear Sir John’s answers.

Lord Mawson: I will, but I am trying to create a conversation. I have been involved in trying to enable the social sector to come into our town centres, which is a good thing, but one of the problems for the social sector is that they often know a lot about the social and not about the enterprise. Sometimes the systems of government encourage the whole social conversation, so it would be good if you could say a bit about your experience of that.

Sir John Timpson: Going back to the role of government in this, I am fairly clear that there is a danger, not just in this area but in others, that the Government think they run the country. They do not run the country. We run the country. The Government are there to support us and help us to do it. There is a danger—I am moving away from retail here—that we get restricted by so many regulations, safeguarding and guidelines that we are not allowed to run our own businesses. That is why I emphasise upside-down government. The role of government is what it can do to help us to run, in this case, the high street.

Do the Government know what they are doing? One area where they certainly do not seem to know what they are doing is business rates. Do they want to change business rates to make it fair and have a level playing field between online and physical shopping and everything else? Either they do not want to do it or they do not know how to do it, but they do not talk to us to find out whether there is a suitable answer.

Q30 The Chair: Could we explore this question of business rates for a moment? It will come up in this inquiry and there is a diversity of views, so your comments will be helpful.

Although business rates are paid by the retailer, economically they are a tax on the property, and normally the property does not belong to the retailer but is rented from a landlord of some sort. Of course, it is possible that, with some shops, the retailer owns the shop and this would not then apply. What retailers do in a situation of supply and demand is bid up what they are willing to pay to take on a retail unit, and rent and business rates are included in that. If you eliminate the business rates, the next time this happens and the lease comes up for renewal it will not affect what they are willing to pay; it just means that the value will be transferred to the owner of the premises. Fundamentally, reducing business rates over time benefits the landlord rather than the retailer. That is the argument. Economically, that has to be the case. How do you prevent that happening?

Sir John Timpson: Economically, there are two problems. First, the level of business rates. When I started out in business, there was a very clear rule that the rates tended to be a third of the rent, and that went on for years. Now, we have instances where the rates are considerably more than the rent.

The Chair: We have instances where the rates are the only charge. During the 2008 crises you had almost rent-free property, as long as you paid the business rates.

Sir John Timpson: Yes, because the landlord does not want to pay the rates so wants it to be occupied, because the level of rental value has gone down so much. But that is one point.

The Chair: Why is that a bad thing for the retailer? That is an environment of falling rents.

Sir John Timpson: Rates have been allowed to go up. It is nothing to do with the actual premises but to do with the level of inflation. That is how they have got to where they are. If you go to Aldershot, shops are not worth anything like what they were 20 years ago, but the rates have still gone up, so premises are even more likely to be empty because no one wants to pay the rates. That is one part of it: they are unrealistic. They might be tied to the property, but they are related in the wrong way to the property. They do not value the property the right way.

The second point is that rates do not apply in the same way to online businesses, because they are applied only to a big warehouse and that is it. Physical retailers are at a big disadvantage compared with online retailers. Those are the two points that need to be addressed.

Q31 Lord Mawson: Could you say more about why you would like to see five and not the 120 good examples?

Sir John Timpson: Because that is the way the world learns. You can keep having theories and talking around it like this—we might have our own idea about what shopping should look like—but the only way to come up with a real answer is to do something that works. Take a town like Altrincham, which was doing very badly and is now doing better. Get people to go there, have a look at what is happening and interpret that for their own town, so that instead of having theoretical ideas thrown at them, they have real examples that work and they can copy them.

A long time ago, I was the fashion buyer for our ladies shoes when we had the shoe shops. I went to Italy every year and looked at what was selling there, because I knew it would work if we copied it. That was how I did the job, and I am talking about the same sort of thing here.

It is a bit more difficult in the trade I am in now, because there are not many examples of it elsewhere, but good retailers will always be travelling abroad and looking at other shopping centres to say, “I’ll copy that and copy that”. That is why I say five. Five is enough, and that five breeds another 10, 15, and so on.

But there is not just one answer. The answer for Portsmouth or Poole or wherever will be very different from somewhere in the north-east or in Scotland. You have to interpret the good things for wherever you live but it all starts with a little idea and building on it, so that is why I say five.

Q32 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Do you think the High Street Task Force is achieving the aims that you set out in your 2018 review?

Sir John Timpson: It is there. You can read the minutes of the meeting, which I did the other day.

The Chair: That is not what I call a radically warm endorsement. It is like saying, “The patient is alive”.

Sir John Timpson: That was an introduction. I would go on to say that it is too early to say, but at least we are talking about redeveloping the high street.

Q33 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Are the signs encouraging? You made a number of recommendations. Can you see the green shoots with any of the more important recommendations? Can you see things happening?

Sir John Timpson: I am afraid I will come back to the answer I first thought of, which is that I would like to see more evidence. You are not going to get that yet, because, do not forget, it did not get going until three years ago, I think. Most of the early bit was in the middle of Covid, so we cannot expect much to happen yet, physically.

The Chair: It has money at its disposal, has it not?

Sir John Timpson: Oh yes.

The Chair: Presumably you can look at what they are spending their money on or planning to spend their money on. Do you think they have that right?

Sir John Timpson: There is the danger that there has been some political spreading of it over too many places.

The Chair: Too thin?

Sir John Timpson: Too thin, yes.

Q34 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Good morning, Sir John. You have just referred to the Covid pandemic, and of course your review was published before the pandemic and the current cost of living crisis. Are there any different recommendations you would make in light of those two things?

Sir John Timpson: No, nothing has really changed. But do not forget that what happened to the high street was horrific. The miracle is that it is as strong now as it was before. In fact, my business is even stronger. I am amazed. When you think that we had a minimum of six weeks and up to three, four months when all the shops were closed, no income coming in and, despite the furlough money coming and so on, all your cash reserves disappeared overnight. Also, the lockdown handed the business to the major threatening opposition: online shopping. It was a boom for the online shopping market, and experts were forecasting, “This is the end of the high street,” but they were totally wrong. We are probably in as good a place now as we would have been if the pandemic had not happened at all.

In the end, the online businesses have probably suffered more than we have, because they geared themselves up to the level of extreme demand that happened at the beginning of the lockdown—I talked to a business in this situation yesterday—and they finished up with too much investment, too much stock. They now do not know where to go, so they are the ones that finished up in trouble.

So no, I would not change the recommendations, because we are looking at a very long period of development. When I started, a lot of the shopping was in very local little areas. Then they had the Arndale centres and the redevelopment of cities that were recovering from the bombing in the war, then they developed the out-of-town shopping centres, and so it went on. That will continue.

Q35 Baroness Andrews: You seem to be rejecting the narrative that the high street is in decline for all the many reasons that the many expert bodies that have looked at the role of the high street have attributed—online shopping, business rates, changing behaviour, and some impacts of Covid that drove the more vulnerable away and which have not recovered. Are you saying, Sir John, that you do not believe the high street is in decline?

Sir John Timpson: It is not in decline, as such. It is always changing. You might get the impression that it is in decline if you go to almost any shopping area, but not all—not in Truro, for instance. But most places you go to you will see quite a lot of empty shops, and you immediately say, “Oh God, it’s terrible. Look at all those shops that have closed down”. The problem, of course, is that there are far too many retail premises. You have enough shops to cater for all the shopping that happened before the out-of-town shopping, before the online shopping, and many more besides, because some developments were allowed by local councils, which were a step too far.

The empty shops are just a sign. It is not that the business is bad, but that there are just too many retail premises around. In fact—and I see the figures—our trade in town centres is up on last year. It is better than before. That is in town centres, not just the ones we have out of town, which is a sign that the customers are going past the door. It might get smaller, but that does not mean the end of it. It means that it is a change.

Q36 Baroness Andrews: When you are looking for your five big examples of businesses that are doing that things you approve of—whether they are innovative, repurposing or whatever—what exactly are you looking for? You said that there is no one size fits all, but could you give us an idea of what you would think was essential in those five places to make them thrive?

Sir John Timpson: I am trying to think. I was asked to go to Accrington and look around and then say what I would do with it. It was so obvious. There is a shopping centre there—I think it might be an Arndale centre—which does not work anymore, so knock it down. There is a wonderful old market in the middle. Regenerate it and make it part of the centre, and then relate all the other shops to each other so there is a flow between them. Use the knocked down shopping centre to introduce more housing in the middle, and make sure that you attract more of the other things that are not retail. Put it all together and you have a new town.

Baroness Andrews: That is place-making.

Sir John Timpson: It is place-making, which is just another word for regeneration.

Q37 The Chair: Can I put a provocative challenge to you? We could see the high street as a place where people not only trade but go to meet each other, stay and have a cup of coffee, possibly to go with their boyfriend or girlfriend to a movie or something like that, so there is an entertainment element to it as well.

However, our high streets are failing to do all those things, and one reason is because of large out-of-town shopping centres. People have migrated to those large out-of-town shopping centres because it is much easier to do all those things in a more welcoming environment and where you have what I will call a sort of managed environment, because it is all privately owned. You are indoors: you do not have to worry about the rain pouring down into your cup of coffee, the cinema is there at hand, there are even things like public lavatories that local authorities do not generally support anymore on the high street, and so on. Surely people have migrated to out-of-town shopping centres because they can do all the things that we want them to do in the out-of-town shopping centre. They do not need the high street anymore. Why are we bothering about it?

Sir John Timpson: We do not have the same mix of shops out there, but the town centres consistently shot themselves in the foot with their attitude towards parking charges. How stupid that was. Their biggest competitors are the supermarkets in the out-of-town centres, and they put up the parking charges and make themselves even less competitive with the very people who are nicking their business.

So part of what I do at Accrington is to have a real way of trying to look after the motorists in a sensible way that does not destroy the environment. It cannot be done, but would it not be wonderful if you could park in a free car park in easy reach of the town and then have a wonderful electric shuttle that takes you right into the middle, a bit like going to Gatwick or wherever it is between the terminals? That is the sort of innovation that is trying to attract and look after people. Yes, it is a lot easier to go to the out-of-town places, but people will go to the town centres if there is the right mix of things to go for.

The Chair: Thank you.

Q38 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Thank you so much for coming this morning, Sir John. It has been a really interesting session. Staying with the transport theme, what mix of transport provision do you think is ideal to keep the high streets alive and make them thrive?

Sir John Timpson: You have to have everything. We are fairly fortunate where I live in the north-west, in the south of Manchester, as we have trams and buses.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: I wanted to ask you particularly about the trams, because you have been talking quite a bit about Altrincham. Do you think that the revival and prosperity of Altrincham is due in part to the arrival of the Metrolink and the provision of frequent services on the trams?

Sir John Timpson: Not a lot, but it is a contributing factor. The big thing in Altrincham was what they did to the market. They recognised the history: it was a market town, one of the original places where you came to sell your animals, your wheat and all the rest of it. Altrincham market was always a big number, and they have used the market as a sort of focal point, which has been much more important than we were expecting. We had a tram when I was a lad, I used to use it. It was an electric train really, but it was like the tram—it did the same thing—and I used to use it to go to Old Trafford and watch the cricket; not the football, just the cricket.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: But you talked about the mix of public transport.

Sir John Timpson: Yes, but do not look as if you are trying to put the people off who come by car. If you do not look after the people who drive, you are giving your business to the out-of-town shopping centres.

The Chair: Sir John, we are very grateful to you for your time, and it has been a very interesting session indeed. So at that point, unless there are any other supplementary questions, I will draw the session to a close.