Colin Hicks – Written evidence (HSC0038)

Formerly FRSA, chairman of the Chichester BID and C20 Society rep on the local Conservation Area Advisory Committee, now a retired citizen

How do you define a high street in a town or small city and what is its purpose?

Definition: The future high street adds further values to the economic value of commercial transaction, and is designed to provide a full set of functions that support modern living [1]. For the price of a cup of coffee it provides convenient access to a fully rounded life.

Purpose: To provide spatial, economic, social and even digital solutions to widen local wealth, health, learning, leisure and work successes. These functions are provided for in town and city centres that can offer:

A warm welcome designed to promote return visits.
A raised footfall to provide sufficient critical mass to make it worth high street businesses promoting their offer and convert these visits into sales.
The advantages of being compact – walkable/cyclable, accessible, proportionate, human sized.
Deliverable functions to work, play, do business, learn, well-being and entertainment – even given local constraints.
A wide retail mix running from the aspirational to the daily essential, the startup independent to the anchor outlet.
Added value activities to prolong the stay, such as: destination markets (e.g. everyday needs, street food, healthy eating, design, teenage, upcycling), a café and eating out culture, work spaces, leisure and health facilities, cultural and neglected heritage assets, green spaces and varied evening entertainments.
Spaces designed for multiple use, adaptable to meet needs that vary for social, demographic, daytime and evening reasons. This is particularly true in the recycling of abandoned department stores.
Family friendly public events to increase footfall and promote discovery of the variety of resources on offer.
Savvy cities are also taking care to offer digital support functions to enhance the quality of visit for the digital native, items such as interactive shopping and discovery apps, decent 5G mobile phone signals and online collect and return hubs.

What should be included on high streets to meet the needs of the whole community?

The future high street operates as much like a deliberately welcoming attraction, a more complex offer of commercial opportunities offering additional experiences designed to suit the local demographic and variations in disposable income. Which alert authorities will have audited in preparation.

As well as a quality shopping experience these offer:

For the community: information sources and welfare provision, drop-in centres to improve daily living conditions, restoration of in-town residential opportunity
For a visitor: the opportunity to live like a local during their stay
For all: experiences in food, drink, arts, heritage, education; spaces for social exchange; access to the health, fitness and tourism opportunities available in the rural hinterland
A crisp and attractive public realm built on policies of convenience, accessibility, safety, walkability and the provision of mobility transport, childcare, water, seating, litter control and sanitised toilets

There are constraints to providing this, most notably because land use patterns in our towns are mostly already in place. However, some impact from these proposed measures is better than not seeking to counter the decline at all. A proactive local authority officer class is also required to get things moving.

What should be done to ensure that high streets being redeveloped now are structurally and financially resilient for future societal changes?

Develop the latent identities of the town or city with better place-making by investing in the backdrop (i.e. a well-designed and maintained public realm and built environment); that will develop and maintain civic pride that motivates locals to visit their own town or city and sell it on to the visitor.
Prioritise development opportunities of their brownfield sites that will match the overall backdrop and eliminate dilapidation.
Invest in making the visit convenient:

Sprucing up visitor gateways - such as railway and bus stations, car parks, roundabouts, ring roads
Removal of deterrents to access (poor inward travel, traffic, excessive parking charges, unsafe streets - from trip hazards to anti-social behaviour)
Comprehensive provision of traffic and pedestrian way-finding both on the ground and digitally
Major exploitation of free digital discovery tools such as Google maps and Facebook pages, that can attract and promote virtual visits from the armchair and convert into actual visits.

Care for the built environment:

Using powers to ensure town centre property maintenance is regular and sustained.
Developing flexible (preferably modular) spaces to enable a responsive situation to premises use, that future-proofs as many sizes and types of activity demand as can be predicted.
Concentrate a shrinking offer by contracting the offer into zones, designed to protect business quarters from new residential backlash, such as conflicts with a vibrant night-time economy.

Provide a programme of events that will encourage more footfall in toan and city centres both daytime, evenings and night-times to support the local economy.
All levels of government should improve their ability to support the local ecology formed by the independent shops and businesses.

Re financing:

Use participatory budgeting at a local level, by strengthening the levyable resources of business improvement districts and town council precepts.
These to be seen as citizen levies, ring-fenced for very specific local needs in improving the public realm and related offers. The high street thus produced seen to have been improved on a short timescale, so that the link between the levy and the visible result creates community trust. This in turn will alleviate current levels of ineffective “consultation” fatigue and promote the democratic involvement of local citizens in “action” deliverables in its place – which is what many are crying out for.
Link the business rate more properly to a tax on the successes of their annual turnover, not their premises (rental) size – which is not in the control of the business where there is a landlord and so the tax resented.
For a similar reason, transfer payment of the BID levies more properly to the landlords, based on the successes of their rental income - as was the original design for BIDs at their Toronto beginnings; together with doubling the acceptable levy percentage to be claimed from the current 1.5-2% of the business rate. (If town councils and BIDs thus work together, they should here be able to double the amount of local ring-fenced finance available).
Give the relevant public authorities powers to take over empty premises for objectives other than commercial while empty, to reduce the blight of persistent empties as well as provide proto-commercial opportunities to start-ups or charities who need to test a high street presence.
Use larger council reserves as investment funds, with measurable returns built-in where possible, including benefits not always financial yet meeting other council objectives; such as legal statutory services or provision of the ambitions identified in local/neighbourhood plans.

As not with my local district council, central government should be providing assistance to the competent local authorities to develop a Regeneration Strategy for each small town or city that will:

set out the overall direction of travel, act as a catalyst for change and work in partnership
determine key strategic land and physical assets
provide a clear framework for decision-making

This Strategy to sit alongside any other local Vision or Economic Development Strategy or adopted and emerging local plans.

22 March 2024

[1] The American model of consumption has moved onto the internet and the out of town shopping malls for particular offers such as fashion, tourism and household. These activities are being replaced in the high street by more complex behaviours that reflect life experiences or cannot be delivered as easily via a digital platform. Items such as – raising a family, keeping fit, negotiating the poverty gap, caring for the less advantaged, supporting sustainability under climate change, providing simple and safe collaborative environments that combat social isolation and fragmentation, improving well-being and rebalancing the live-work equation, etc. While learning new skills and being entertained - items currently of great interest and developed consumption - have migrated somewhat to the digital, not all aspects of these offers have been found to deliver satisfactorily on those platforms: because live contact is irreplaceable in some part these digital offers are proving to be less than whole experiences.