16
Examination of witnesses
Mark Dransfield, Amanda Holmes and Andrew Malley.
The Chair: Good morning. Welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee and this evidence session in our inquiry into high streets in towns and small cities. This morning, we welcome witnesses from the private developer Dransfield Properties: Mark Dransfield, who is the founder and managing director; Amanda Holmes, who is the communications and consultation lead; and Andrew Malley, who is the retail property director. Thank you for coming.
My name is Daniel Moylan and I chair the committee. I am not going to introduce other members of the committee individually at this stage, but I will do so when they ask their questions. Two members are joining us remotely. One member, Lord Faulkner, is detained by a ministerial meeting and will arrive a bit later. I would be grateful if answers could be kept brisk. Indeed, I will try to ensure that members of the committee are brisk in asking their questions as well.
Q185 Viscount Hanworth: Mark Dransfield, this question is for you. Based on your experience in developing shopping centres, what things do you regard as vital for a resilient high street? What qualities are you looking for in a viable investment project, and what is necessary in order to attract the finance?
Mark Dransfield: For retail developments, the most important thing is anchor tenants—that is, a necessity shop, generally a food store. The food store delivers people to the high street every day of the week. Then, on the back of that, you get further shopping.
Let me take you, if I may, back to the 1970s, when we had in-centre supermarkets. Then, in the 1980s, we had the evolvement of supermarkets out of town, where you would have a huge supermarket with a flat-bed car park and petrol filling stations. Everybody used to flock to those. Then, in the 1990s, town centres started to decline because the shops around the necessity food store had no purpose. Nobody was going to the centre; they were going out of town to shop.
Margaret Thatcher brought in what was called PPG6[1], which was the town centre test. We used to, and still do, work for all the major food suppliers and food supermarkets. They all said, “We’re not going to alter our policy”, but within 12 months they had all altered their policies, because the Government insisted that they had a test, first, for the town centre, then the edge of town, then out of town. So all the food stores started to deliver a new concept for town centres. On the back of that, you started to see town centres starting to flourish again. There were a lot of call-ins and public inquiries, and a lot of out-of-town schemes were turned down. That delivered successful town centres again.
Q186 Viscount Hanworth: Subsequent questions will ask in detail about the trade-off between town centre and out of town, but what are the commercial advantages in renting to independent small businesses over large chains and multiples? How do you incentivise commercial?
Mark Dransfield: Commercially, there is no incentivisation whatever to let to local traders. Some 25% of our portfolio is independent traders. It is essential for us, because I am from a working-class background, but the valuers value independence and downgrade independent businesses compared to plc businesses. There is a disparity in yield of about 50%. The banks that lend to them and the purchasers all want to have plc covenants in their stable, not independents. But, to me, in order to deliver a successful scheme, you must have a balance between independents and plcs because your plcs alter shopping patterns. People are so brand-aware now. They go to shop for those brands. The independents can then pick up on the back of that and give a different quality of shopping experience to the consumer.
Viscount Hanworth: How do you overcome the disadvantages that independents face in trying to establish themselves, then? They are manifest, I think.
Mark Dransfield: The simplest way to look at it is that there is more monetary value in engaging with plc covenants and getting them to take retail space than there is in independents.
Viscount Hanworth: We have understood that. Okay.
The Chair: What do you mean when you say that, in order to be successful, you would want to have independent traders—in your case, 25%? If that is not commercial success, what sort of success is it?
Mark Dransfield: The independents generally take small space, while the national operators take larger space. You can fill the smaller space uses up when you create developments. When you build a new development, you do not have everybody signed up to take space. Our business is always to deliver quality built environment with good quality architecture; then you can always fill the space. But the small independents take up the small space and the slack in the developments for us. That gives added value, but the banks do value those down.
The Chair: I completely understand that. I understand the importance of the covenant. I am trying to work out what the criteria for success on a high street are. From your point of view, you say that it is not maximising value, but, on the other hand, filling up small spaces that would not be taken otherwise probably is a maximisation of value.
Viscount Hanworth: Can I come in with a comment?
The Chair: No, I want to hear from the witness.
Viscount Hanworth: I think you are implying that, as a developer, you need to take an holistic view of the entire development. Is that the case you are making?
Mark Dransfield: You have to have a balance between the two. You have to fund your scheme, which is where the multiples come in, but the vibrancy is often led by the independent sector. They own their locality, they are much more passionate, and they commit themselves in a different way to a multiple retailer with managers.
The independent sector is very important to creating a successful shopping centre that attracts the public once it is open—hence why we need a balance. We have to fund and let during the building with the multiples, but we also have to bring in independents to help with the vibrancy and establish the sense of success for the future.
Viscount Hanworth: Yes, that is exactly the point I apprehended. Thank you. My question is fulfilled.
Q187 The Chair: May I continue, though? What is the evidence that consumers actually want brands? There is a lot of evidence that consumers, especially young people, are looking for independents nowadays. I grant you that people want food. The way we retail food in this country nowadays means that they probably want a branch of Marks & Spencer Food, Waitrose, Tesco or something like that. I completely understand why you, as an anchor, would want that, but leaving food to one side, what is the evidence that people really do want brands?
Mark Dransfield: The only evidence we can provide you with, because there is no factual evidence, is footfall numbers. The kids on the street all want branded products. They buy the proper branded products, if they can afford to, or substitution products from a secondary market. They all want to see Gucci, Hermès or whatever. They are very showy.
Consumers have altered a lot over the past 20 years. People are very brand driven. If you have one independent that is selling its own brand, unless it has a huge social media presence, people will not buy. The only thing that drives people there is the fact that they are part of a bigger conglomerate of retail activity. People will drift into the shop, try something on and probably get a personal service. That service will be better than a national operator and will lead to a sale. That is just how retail is at the moment.
Q188 Baroness Eaton: Good morning. My question has two parts and it is about private investment. The first part is: when you are considering towns and small cities for private investment, what do you look for and what do you want to avoid? The second part is: for the places that are not attractive to private investment, what local and central government things do you think would drive and encourage investment in those places?
Andrew Malley: In the first instance, we look for good communication links—good highway links, and where the public car park is in relation to the centres, because retail is quite simple: no car parking, no shopping. So we look for bus routes and train routes. Generally, our schemes are located half an hour outside the major city where the bosses live and where there is disposable income. Disposable income is hugely important to the success of a scheme. We profile our catchments, so we understand within a 10 or 15-minute drive time who our catchment is—age profile, sex, everything. We understand precisely which retailers will fit that catchment. We can almost make a bespoke centre to cater for its catchments.
Q189 Baroness Eaton: What do you avoid in that instance where private investment is going to come? What would put it off? What disadvantage would you consider?
Andrew Malley: The main disadvantage would be a large, well-established out-of-town retail presence out of town, or if there are plans to bring out-of-town to that locality. Then we would probably avoid it. If there was also a dominant neighbour, where the town in question was near a much stronger place that had very good retail provision, we would probably avoid that. We have been successful in some centres where the councils have also supported us, and they have dismissed out-of-town retail in order to support town centre growth in places like Morpeth and Stroud. That has allowed us to invest in the centres in particular.
Mark Dransfield: Stroud is a good example. We invested in Stroud and, at the time, the chief executive came to see a few of our schemes. We were just about to start to make the purchase and an out-of-town application came in. We said to the council, “If you approve this, we’re not investing in your town centre, because it’s so finely balanced and it’s never going to come back. If you refuse that, it’ll send a clear message out to retailers that you’ve got a ‘town centre first’ policy”.
My honest belief is that your town centre should cater for every person in your community. It should have a doctor's surgery, a police station, a library, retail, a food offering and the market. It should be the heartbeat of the community. With the advent of out-of-town retailing—and, to a degree, internet shopping—this has deteriorated dramatically in our country. We are driven to deliver quality schemes like this. Stroud is a major example. We have just done a huge medical centre there and it is absolutely in the town centre. People come to get a coffee and socialise. The disruption is great for mental health, because people come and talk to each other. We are social creatures.
When you have an out-of-town retail, people drive there, shop and go home. With the internet, they buy and get a delivery to home. There is no interaction, and the things are literally thrown in the garden. When you have a town centre that has a full offer in a town, people go to that town, socialise and do a multiple shop. They may go to the doctors and then maybe to the library, they may do some shopping and buy some food, and then they go home. It is a multiple shop. They are not just going on the internet and buying one product and having it shipped to their door, so there are a load of CO2 emissions and a load of waste. All our centres have waste recycling and we are driven to make sure that we help the environment as much as possible and try to make our centres accessible to people.
Accessibility is everything. Going back to my first point, car parking is essential. There are local authorities now that deliver no car parking to the town centres and wonder why the town centre is not working. There is no evidence base for everything. A lot of this is common sense. I urge at this meeting today that people try to get local authorities to become local authorities again, to be custodians of our town centres and to help us to deliver things.
We have no grants to support us—we used to get ERDF grants—to create beautiful quality architecture. If you create good quality architecture, it lifts people's spirits. In our own town of Fox Valley in Sheffield, we bought an old steelworks, which we flattened. It had been derelict for over 15 years. We built a new town centre that became the pride of the population. People were coming down dressed up. They were proud of their environment, proud of their town centre. We delivered 1,000 jobs. Those jobs are office based and retail based. There are gyms, everything. It is a proper town centre, and that is what we need to start delivering.
The town centres that are linear and have failed need a new purpose. Patching over these problems needs to stop, because there is no future for them. Those centres may need to be reduced to become small district centres to serve their immediate catchment. Maybe they need a new library, some good public realm, and a convenience store so that people can go there, walk to there, and shop there, where people do not have a high propensity of car ownership.
It is not difficult, but people need to be treated with respect. My view is that people should be entitled to a good-quality architecture, good-quality public realm and good service. People need to be able to be served and not go to self-scanning machines. If you do that, what happens? Theft goes through the roof. In one scheme in the north-east, £8,000 per week is disappearing out of one store; there is the theft of meat and alcohol. We go to the police and say, “We’ve got a problem here. Can you help us?” There are no police.
Our retailers in our centres pay service charges. They pay a separate charge for their own car park, lighting, public realm, waste disposal, maintenance of the car park, lighting, Christmas decorations—everything that goes into running a centre. On top of that, they pay rates. What for? Nothing. We pay rates for nothing, because we have already paid for the infrastructure because we have had Section 106 contributions to build maybe a new treatment plant for the sewage or whatever. We cannot get a police officer on our site. We cannot get fire or ambulance people on our site. The rates are where the problem lies, along with the multitude of other smaller items. If you resolve the rates situation, things start to move forward.
Look at the internet: you have Amazon in greenfield sites with 1 million square feet. It is paying a maximum of £12 a square foot. Come into a town centre, and payments will range anywhere between £25 and £35 a square foot. Those people in the greenfield sites do not pay the rates that are applied to a town or city centre. There is no parity, so the retailers cannot compete. The only way they can compete is to give personal service. This is the real issue that needs resolving—the rates situation.
Q190 Baroness Eaton: Picking up on the point about what local and national government can do in areas where private investment is not forthcoming, you are saying that there needs to be more understanding of the requirements of the services that the state provides and dealing with the system, presumably business rates and rates in general?
Mark Dransfield: Absolutely, 100%.
Andrew Malley: Rates are quite an indiscriminate tax, because they tax the space the business is occupying, regardless of the nature of the business and the affordability.
The Chair: It is a tax on land and property. So is rent.
Andrew Malley: It is.
The Chair: One has turnover-based rents and so forth now. They are increasingly variable, but traditional rent is just the same.
Andrew Malley: It can vary, you are right, with turnover rents.
Mark Dransfield: Rents have come down and rates have gone up. If you look at the disparity now, the rates are significantly higher than they have ever been.
Andrew Malley: I think we are saying as a proportion of occupancy costs.
The Chair: Rates will always go up, because they are on a cycle of going up.
Andrew Malley: In lots of centres, rents are now back to 1995 levels, so they have been falling for the last 10 years.
The Chair: But the total costs of occupation are not going up as fast as rates, because the rents are coming down.
Andrew Malley: The rents are compensating for it. Less money is being taken in high street shops, so occupation costs need to reduce. It is rent that has been impacted by that.
The Chair: That is an important point.
Mark Dransfield: But you always used to get a service with rates. That is what the industry is shouting out for: there is no service for paying rates. What do the retailers get when they pay rates?
The Chair: You can ask the same question about domestic rates, because those have also been severed over time from local services. The services that the tax provided in the late 19th century are no longer provided by municipalities, on the whole.
Mark Dransfield: But retailers pay a service charge—
The Chair: Your water used to be provided by your municipality, for example—that has not been true since the 1970s—and so forth.
Mark Dransfield: Retailers pay a service charge for security, which should be done by the police.
The Chair: I do not understand. Presumably your service charge is paid to you on your estate, as manager of the estate.
Mark Dransfield: Yes.
Andrew Malley: It is to provide the services to keep the street clean, to keep it well lit, to keep security, to keep the car parks.
Mark Dransfield: It is not for profit; we make no profit.
Andrew Malley: It is not a profit centre; it is spent.
The Chair: I appreciate that it is not a profit centre, but this is on your private land.
Mark Dransfield: That is right. We would have no car parks otherwise.
The Chair: I understand that. I am just asking why the local authority would pay for that.
Andrew Malley: We are not suggesting it would. The question is what additional charge is a raise in rates and what the retailer gets, policing and other things, to help support that community.
The Chair: I understand.
Q191 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: In a way, my question is a follow-up to that. Does the current system provide a competitive advantage to out-of-town retail parks? You have very much concurred with that already, but I wonder whether you could expand on it in terms of how the current system does that.
That comes to the question of investment and why private developers would invest, but I think you have covered that. Would stronger planning policies prioritising town centre developments have an impact? You seem to be suggesting focusing on that and making it a public policy priority. Perhaps you could elaborate on that a bit.
Mark Dransfield: First, we have all shopped at out of centre and probably still do. You have free car parking and retailers that are easily accessible, because people shop in their car. Rents and rates on out-of-town retail parks are cheaper than in the town centre, so the overall occupancy charges for the retailers is significantly less than in a town centre, plus they have a car park. People are lazy; they would park inside the shop if they could. They can park literally on the doorstep, walk in, shop and go home. There is no social interaction with that. That is our understanding of the position.
Andrew Malley: The stable doors are open on that and we cannot close them after the event. We have out-of-town retail in most places, and there has been an expansion of it in the last 10 to 15 years over the previous period, when the challenges about getting consent, with the sequential test and establishing need, were quite high hurdles. People went forward with an out-of-town application, knowing they had to meet quite stringent tests. I would not say that was a strong barrier, but it was a deterrent where it was a weak case. As planning policies and PPG6 have dropped away, it has made it easier to apply for out-of-town retail. There has probably been less scrutiny of it because, in some circles, we are looking for jobs and regeneration, but there is a price to pay for that, which is the deterioration of the town centre.
If there was a strengthening of policies towards town centres to push retail into the town or on to the edge of it as a first choice before you can go out of town, that change in planning policy would be helpful. It would at least mean that the town centre has to be scrutinised first to see whether that demand can be met in the town centre. With some towns failing in parts, there may well be development opportunities with a reduction in land values because of rental reductions. Large parts of town centres are vacant, so landlords are looking at other options.
Mark Dransfield: We have been involved in think tanks before. We were involved with the British Council of Shopping Centres with Mary Portas. At the meeting with Mary Portas when she delivered her eight-point plan, she asked what we would be prepared to contribute. I said that we would all agree to an embargo on out-of-town retail for three to five years. All the major companies were there, and we all agreed that we would do that. She took that away. It never appeared in the eight-point plan because it would not generate rates. If you build an Asda store out of town or a Tescoz, it is £1 million payable in rates. David Cameron did not want to take that on board and it was struck off the list. That is a short-term measure.
We should be here as custodians of our properties in our town centres, looking at a long-term plan. One issue we have is that when we apply for planning we have the initial contact with the local authority to scope out the work. This was supposed to accelerate our planning process. It has made it more cumbersome. The local authority workers are not in the office five days a week, so you have planners working from home. In one particular scheme in Stroud, we have not seen our planning officer for two years. It is wrong.
Andrew Malley: That reflects the lack of resources in the built environment—in urban regeneration, planning and estates. Those departments have probably seen more cuts than other departments that deliver direct services, like collecting the rubbish and things like that. For those departments, particularly if you are going to run a compulsory purchase order to develop the town centre, you can see that the local authority’s view is that they are necessary, but most councils do not have the resources for that—certainly the smaller ones do not.
There is a lack of resource there, which is one thing with a change in policy: if you change policy, you need to re-resource those departments and bring the expertise back into the local authority, rather than have it outsourced. The experience we have had in the past is that when a well-resourced local authority is well motivated, if there is a parallel motivated developer involved in the system, things happen.
Mark Dransfield: We were involved in a scheme in Sheffield for Stocksbridge, where we secured £24.1 million. It has a population of 20,000 and is Amanda’s and my home town, where we have delivered our Fox Valley scheme. For me, it was a bit of a muddle. Why would central government give Sheffield City Council the ability to move forward with this when it has a LEP? All the skill sectors were in the LEP. It is used to working with private developers and it has the skill set to award contracts and support, and provide grant aid.
Sheffield was in charge of the money. I was joint chair, and I resigned after we secured the money because I found it impossible to work in treacle. Fees upon fees were being paid. We went into the scheme with our eyes open. Andrew and his team had galvanised all the land assembly. It was all on a plate for them. The planning was all prepared. Here we are four years later and there is not a spade in the ground. It got planning consent two or three weeks ago with no car parking. The scheme we helped to bring forward would have produced £600,000 per annum in perpetuity for our community. That would have paid for Cub Scouts—everything.
The private and public sectors have different agendas. The public sector is risk-averse; the private sector has to take a chance. There has to be a balance. I want to leave you with positivity, not negativity. I firmly believe that local authorities need resourcing correctly, with the correct tools to enable them to deliver schemes. They are not equipped at the moment. They do not have the capital and they certainly do not have the skill set. We need to make sure that our councils have those skill sets, that they become a career, and that people feel proud to represent their communities.
They are the custodians, and they should be. It should be a one-stop shop. You should not have all these different doors in different cities. You should have one door, the town hall. That is where everybody is. Everybody is working and communicating. They need to get back to work five days a week and set an example. My staff are there five days a week. We were there five days a week through Covid; we had to be, because we are a forward-facing organisation dealing with customers. They deal with customers as well. As a Government, they should be leading the way. I am sorry to say that, but it is what I honestly believe.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: What has happened to that scheme?
Mark Dransfield: Nothing. It has received planning consent. Now that there is an election coming up, I think there will be a step back. Let us see what happens at the next election. Will the money be taken back? I do not know.
I hope it happens. It is important for the town that it happens. A lot of facilities there will benefit our community. This is why Amanda, Andrew and I put so much effort into making that happen. The amount of hours we worked with a government officer on that scheme in order to get that money allocated was incredible. For us to see it lie fallow for four years is heartbreaking.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: You are pinpointing there a simple lack of experience and expertise, but also what is in essence a risk-averse approach.
Mark Dransfield: Yes.
Q192 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Good morning. I am not surprised that you have a successful business model, because you are obviously very passionate about it. I am interested to know what your business model suggests to you about how you decide which local areas to get involved in. How do you pick the place? Is there more demand for your developments than for other people’s? Do you think that the way you look at choosing a place to become involved with is in common with other developers?
Mark Dransfield: Because of my lack of property background—I come from construction—we set up our business in a completely different way. I saw retail parks work very successfully, so I decided that we would build new developments in Hull, in John Prescott’s constituency. What I saw there were Victorian terraced properties, with a car park behind. Nobody parked in the car park. It was a drug den, because there was no natural policing of that area. I thought, “What if we create an L-shaped development, with the car park at the front and the shops behind, actually in the district centre?” It worked, but the valuers did not know what they were valuing—that is, whether it was a town centre or something else. It was a bit of a quango at the time. We started to realise the power of putting the car park in the district centre, because that is where people live. They could walk there or go by car or by bus. It was something that we stumbled across, but we developed the concept further.
We have worked in a lot of poor areas. Our philosophy has always been London architecture and sophistication but at Yorkshire prices to make sure that everybody experiences something that makes them go, “Wow”. Whether you have £1 or £1,000 in your pocket, you should be able to have that “wow” experience. It is important.
We bought a scheme in Gainsborough. It was a Marshall’s factory with 8.5 acres of covered space. A lot of it was listed buildings. Field-Marshall’s tractors were world-renowned. It had offices in St Petersburg and London—it was a major conglomerate—but, sadly, it fell into disrepair in the 1970s. We ended up buying the place in the 1990s. We hauled it out and found that having buildings wrapped all the way around was even better, because it was like the old market square but it was a car park. People could park in the middle and go to different locations. We then thought, “Let’s put offices in here”. We started to put 500 square-foot offices in. They filled up quite quickly. If we put in a big office space, it would not get filled because it is a small market town.
People started to like our product, and a lot more schemes have been built. Our schemes have a multitude of occupancy in there. They serve a community and a catchment. People within a 15-minute radius will come to our centre and be successful.
Andrew Malley: Part of the decision-making process there was looking at the towns, where there was a lack of provision, and then looking at the populations they served. In that particular town, Gainsborough, we found that 93p in the pound was being spent outside of the town by its immediate population. That was a hospital case; its town centre needed renewing.
I suppose the main decision-making should probably ask, “Is this place serving its population properly?” If it is not, and it does not have a major competitor or a major out-of-town development, that gives you opportunities to fill a gap there. Holding people in their own town and spending money in their own town creates a lot of pride, et cetera, and an ongoing success.
Mark Dransfield: Beyond that, we want to see housing development improve, with industrialists coming in and being engage with. PING expanded its store; as you probably know, it is an international golf club business. We had a development of 100,000 square feet for Hexadex, which is the biggest CO2 reduction exhaust systems company in Europe. It built a new factory. Five national housebuilders came into town, and thousands of new homes have been built on the back of our scheme. That has really brought consolidation to the town centre. The council has not allowed any out-of-town reselling there.
Q193 Lord Mair: You have spoken with great feeling about your views on local authorities’ role in the planning of high street renewal. Should I get the message that what you are really saying is that they are not resourced well enough? Do you believe that, if they were better resourced, they could have a much more important role in the planning of high streets?
Mark Dransfield: Absolutely, I do.
Andrew Malley: That resource would probably be not just expertise in the council but better sources of support funding, like some form of grant funding that the council could use to invigorate the town by leading on developments or that a developer could access. The ERDF system was successful but has not been replaced with something of a similar nature. That, allied with better-resourced local authorities, would be a useful tool.
Lord Mair: You have also talked about your not-very-good experiences with government funding schemes. Again, what would be the way to improve that situation, in your view?
Mark Dransfield: It would be councils having their own economic regeneration officer, as well as a panel of people who understand developments, to examine a scheme and see whether there is a shortfall of funding and whether it is worth funding. That is hugely important; it is what a lot of the LEPs did. When we went to Gloucestershire to meet GFirst LEP, it was amazing. We had our grant money allocated within six weeks; we had bought the centre within eight weeks. It was very well organised and commercial.
Q194 Lord Mair: What is your view of town boards?
Mark Dransfield: There are some good ones, with well-meaning people on them, but unless they have the support of the local authorities that deal with the money, things will not happen quickly.
Lord Mair: What would you do to improve the delivery of town boards?
Mark Dransfield: I would parachute in some independent people on top of them to make sure that they were administered correctly and efficiently.
Q195 Baroness Janke: What do you feel about the role of the BIDs and other local organisations?
Mark Dransfield: We are tinkering around the edges with BIDs. At the end of the day, we are lucky because we own our town centres. So if we want to put on an event to bring in customers or celebrate local history, we can do that. If you have hundreds or thousands of landlords on one street, they do not have the same agenda. They could be in different countries, so it is difficult to run a BID successfully. In our Morpeth scheme, we have tried to get a BID together. Going back to the rates situation, the simple solution is to get that sorted out.
Amanda Holmes: It is another layer of payment is it not? You are paying rates, you are paying the service charge, and then you are asking people to pay into a BID as well.
Baroness Janke: In my area, the BID generates quite a lot of enthusiasm and events, but it is not a constructed town centre; it is a suburb that has its own character and life. The BID is essential to bring things in. You were talking earlier about paying for waste and for things like Christmas lights and additional attractions to bring people in, including small festivals and so on. The BID is quite good at bringing local groups and local people. Do you do you feel this sort of local involvement is important as well?
Mark Dransfield: Local involvement is essential. We run a lot of markets jointly with the local authority or the town councils and they are very successful. Private sector working with the public sector is the correct balance. It is essential, because you have two ideas. When we are doing the markets we go all around the area researching. We went all round Northumberland researching the best market traders and pinched them to come into our market. So we had the very best market in Northumberland, and it worked. It drew people in. On a Wednesday and a Saturday—particularly on a Wednesday, when the trade was down—all the retailers in the town benefited, because we are a market town community in the UK, and if you do the markets correctly, they work. We did the same in Gainsborough and that worked as well.
Andrew Malley: Operationally, BIDs on day-to-day events and things like that have a great role to play, but that role will not then be expanded into an urban regeneration role where you ask them to start forming plans to remodel the town or drive investment into it. Running the town and making it successful is one thing, but the next stage of regeneration, hard development, probably would have to be led by a different group of more specialist people around the GLEP or the council, that sort of body.
Q196 Lord Bailey of Paddington: I want to ask about the oxymoron of privately-owned public space. What future does it have in town centre redevelopment and who should be responsible for the ongoing maintenance? You made a comment earlier that people pay rates and do not feel like they get anything for that. If there is a privately owned public space, should that come with another charge to keep that space up? How would that go down?
Mark Dransfield: We have privately owned public space now, since we have multijet fountains, green areas and bandstands. We even do weddings in some of our centres. On privately owned land, it is for the private individual to look after those, but we maintain our roundabouts and our grass verges, and we litter pick. The council owns the resource. Councils generally used to have direct works that looked after the carriageway, the public highway and the parks, but they need strengthening because they do not have enough staff to look after their own areas.
The public realm is hugely important. It makes the town centre. It adds to the vibrancy. One person said to me, “Mark, if somebody can walk on to your centre and say, ‘That’s why your centre’s important’”, you have got it completely wrong. It has to be a multitude of everything. You have to switch every sense on when you go into a town centre—your eyes, your ears and your nose. It has to look, smell and be lovely, and everything has to be clean. No graffiti. It needs cleaning every day.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: What about the challenges? If it is your space, you own it, you can then dictate what happens on it. That is the oxymoron part: it is great when you have privately owned public space that is kept well, because there is a financial return on keeping it well, but what happens when you want to have an event? You can prevent people coming there, you can collect people’s data because it is your space. Where does the community input lie in that scenario?
Andrew Malley: There is a lot of shared use of the space, and in a lot of our community-based events the community gets involved and helps us to run them. But you are right: it is not separate to our site, it is within it. If a space was developed as part of the towns fund BID—like in Stocksbridge, for instance, with Fox Valley—it would fall into the public realm, which the council would look after. That would then, I assume, be offered for a multitude of different uses as well.
However, nobody else is willing to contribute to the management of our space except for us and our tenants. On that basis, we have to take the lead, because nobody else is offering to participate. As Mark said, our management goes beyond our boundaries. We carry on out on to the public highway and beyond, because we want the environment around the centre to match the centre as well. So ownership comes with the fact that nobody else is prepared to contribute to it either.
Q197 Lord Bailey of Paddington: When you set up a development and look at the physicality of it, do you draw a line around where you will stop investing in the public realm, or do you negotiate with the council and say, “We could do more if you support us?”
Mark Dransfield: We take very seriously the heritage of our centres that we invest in. We research the history. The lawnmower was invented in Stroud, and Stroud produces the red thread for the Coldstream Guards. We take that history and bring that into our scheme. We have a living wall that we produce. The council did not ask us to put a living wall there, but we have done and it has a red vein running through it. We look at all the history. In Stocksbridge, in Fox Valley, we have a history wall so that people can see how the employees used to make umbrellas. The paragon of the umbrella was invented at Stocksbridge, so we had a building made to look like the paragon of an umbrella.
History, and respecting it, is important. I think that is why our centres have worked: it is because people feel at home there. They understand and see the history, and they see the new architecture that depicts the new generation moving forward.
Andrew Malley: History also puts it back into the local community, as part of a space they have ownership of.
Q198 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: I apologise for missing the first part of your evidence. I shall look forward to reading that in the transcript. I am afraid I was delayed at a meeting at the Home Office on something else. What have been the impacts of the changes to permitted development rights and the introduction of use class E on your development projects?
Andrew Malley: There have not been many examples of that in our ownerships, but those changes have been positive in that they allow the new occupier to invest confidently without having to go through the delay of making a planning application or having the uncertainty, particularly if it is one of our tenants who is selling their lease, as the tenant may choose to dispose to another party. We think it is positive and allows town centre uses to move around between buildings without the need to slow it down with a costly bureaucratic exercise.
Given that we planned our schemes against some clear advice on what the community needed at that time, there has not been a lot of change in our centre. We have had some estate agents and some office food and drink operators move into retail premises, so we have had a bit of movement between what would have been different use classes before. That has happened quickly and without any barriers. We would say that is very positive.
Mark Dransfield: No landlord wants an empty building, because there would be empty rates, potentially an empty service charge, insurance, or squatters. It has got built up in the system somewhere that landlords sit on properties, but they do not—not in my experience, anyway.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: As a landlord, you would not want to diminish the value and appearance of a centre by having unsuitable tenants.
Mark Dransfield: Absolutely. Not at all.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: So you exercise some discernment.
Andrew Malley: The leases normally provide some control, but we have always been very open-minded. Our leases may look strict in the drafting, but that is not the approach we have taken. If someone comes along wanting changes and we think it is a positive thing, we have always supported them. We do not hold people to leases if they want to expand into bigger premises and relocate. If it is a successful business we let them move, because there will always be somebody else coming along, and they normally stay in the town centre or even in our centre. Flexibility is really important.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: So the changes have not impacted you badly at all.
Mark Dransfield: Not at all, no.
Q199 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Have any of your projects faltered because you discovered that the public, or the people you consult, had concerns about them or did not want them? Ensuring public engagement is key to what you do. What happens when the public do not like what you propose?
Amanda Holmes: We have always had a bottom-up consultation approach, so it is vital that you have that buy-in very early on.
Mark Dransfield: We never go with a blank piece of paper. We say, “Look, this is what we can do. What do you think?” We give them an entry point position so they can comment accurately on what we are proposing.
Amanda Holmes: And make changes.
Mark Dransfield: Yes, we make lots of changes to our schemes. We write to every person who has attended those sessions to let them know whether we have taken on board their comments and, if we have not, why not. That gets people feeling involved and part of the process. We do get people who object. It is natural.
Andrew Malley: You cannot please everybody. Everyone has different ideas.
Mark Dransfield: Not very many, though.
The Chair: Thank you. That brings us to the end of this evidence session. We found it very illuminating and helpful.
