BIDs and Town Teams

[Alan Morris]

Promoting Business Improvement Districts (BIDS) as the basis for a
'Town Team' form recommendations 1 and 2 of the Portas review. It is
good to promote groups that include all stakeholders, but the report
does not discuss how to develop a BID from a grouping of retailers
into a balanced partnership. It might work in a small community where
everyone knows each other and the local retailers predominate, but in
larger places will the common interest be strong enough ? If not, a
BID will stay a separate entity from the community partnership.

Alan

Alan Morris
Bristol Civic Society

[Howard]

Alan
I sense your problem, and I don't think it is an easy answer. I am not
in a big city so do not understand the dynamics.

We have long been urging the local council, to adopt pro-active
planning and marketing measures to promote our vibrant High Street,
Visual appeal is vital, so there are many practical recommendations
for improving the High Street's appearance and cleanliness. Urgent
action is needed to tidy up empty shops right the way across the
country.

Any solutions that other groups have got we would welcome

Howard

p.s If you don't use it - don't complain when you lose it!

On Dec 19 2011, 3:52 pm, Alan Morris <a...@morrises.fastmail.fm>
wrote:

[Tony Burton]

There was a six hour debate on high streets and the Portas Review in the
House of Commons earlier this week.

Have a look at it here
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201212/cmhansrd/cm120117/debtext/
120117-0001.htm#12011733000001 (skip to the end to see the response from the
Minister Grant Shapps) and read a summary prepared by Action for Market
Towns here
http://towns.org.uk/2012/01/19/mps-convene-to-discuss-the-future-of-the-high
-street/.

What do you think are the priorities now for the high street - Civic Voice
is gathering views in a poll on our home page and it would be good to hear
more about what people think here

Tony

Tony Burton
Director
Civic Voice

[Howard Oliver]

Can I ask if any civic societies have any direct experience helping to set up a Business Forum?

[Michael Bach]

Howard

I am not aware of any, but there are certainly some who will be members of town centre partnerships.

Peter -  can you ask London Forum members?
Norman – can you ask your London ATCM network for any examples?

Michael

[Howard Oliver]

Michael

Thanks - in your experience is it acceptable for civic societies to bring on board local business as members. We are thinking a High Street association (for want of a better name) and we want to see how we can work it altogether for a neighbourhoods plan

Any advice from anyone on making that happen would be welcome!

Howard

---

Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 15:01:24 +0000
Subject: Re: Civic High Streets MPs debate high streets
From: micha...@madasafish.com
To: civic-hig...@googlegroups.com
CC: london...@blueyonder.co.uk; NFr...@wandsworth.gov.uk

[john.o...@googlemail.com]

This is a subject close to my heart in my capacity as an historical geographer and probably even more so as a retailer and student of town centre dynamics.

 

The high street, or traditional town centre is under threat for a variety of reasons and it is my belief that the plans initiated following the Portas review and other schemes are seriously flawed becasuue they do not fully recognise the underpinning problems. Terry Leahy was wrong to say that we must simply accept the changes that have been happening, since he has been one of the prime movers in the now firmly entrenched paradigm of perpetual expansion and over-weening market share. This is, of course, one of the problems - but it is not to my mind the most important one, any more than the threat (and it is a real threat) to the traditional bricks and mortar shops by the internet.

 

The history of one of the most significant problems can be traced back throughout the post-war period. Our towns in the immrediate post-war days were relatively balanced between the already established major chains and the essential local retail offer; this was the early developmental days of firms such as Tesco, but others like Boots and Sainsbury were already well established along with a lot whose names are now long since vanished - do you recall the Home & Colonial, MacFisheries, or even the ubiquitous Lyons Tea Shops?  The larger companies adopted increasingly aggressive marketing techniques which many smaller competitors found themselves unable to withstand; but that is business, and to that extent I will support Leahy's thesis. However, the physical space in which these businesses were operating was changing, and no-where more so than in the small to middle sized market towns, and to a very large extent in the larger towns too. In those far-off days many businesses owned their frree-holds, or their landlords were somewhat more benign than the far larger property corporations funded by investment groups that control so much of the town centre estate today.

 

The problem was that the more rapidly developing businesses, for very good reason, sought out the prime spots. These caused the rents to climb; which was a perfectly normal and predictable market response! The archaic method of calculating the local land taxes, these days called the universalbBusiness rate or non-domestic rate (NDR) climbed commensurately. By the early 1970s due to mergers and strong expansion by other means, a core of large retail conglomerates were able to secure large tracts of the prime high street by simply outbidding the opposition, and causing the NDR to increase to levels that most local authorities would have been astonished by. The dual effect of rent and NDR now more markedly marginalised the smaller businesses and created a second tier retail area in many towns and cities close by the more vibrant centre. This continued to appear to work because the crumbs off the table, that is to say, the leakage of footfall from the centre to the peripheral areas was sufficient to sustain a great many new or established small to medium sized enterprises (SME).

 

Changes to planning regulations and the opportunities created by an apparently more affluent and certainly more mobile shopping public drove a demand amongst retailers to develop stores larger than the constraints of the high street would usually allow; to achieve this they moved to previously unthought of sites on the edge of towns - bringing  significant second change to the dynamics of the town. As these large barn-like stores drew ever-increasing revenues from the town centre to these newer out of town and edge of town sites, the larger store groups inevitably began to question the wisdom of dual investment and began the process of withdrawing from traditional sites. How many secondary retail towns are now littered with stores that are architecturally immediately identifiable as Marks & Spencer, or Woolworths, perhaps the ubiquitous stone marking the opening by Montague Burton?

 

The impact of these withdrawals, occuring at varying rates across the country, was to create the basis for the current impasse. The prime sites are over-priced, with commensurately high notional NDR attached to them. SME businesses, that might otherwise have been the embryonic retail business of tomorrow, are denied anything close to prime sites because of the unviable costs, leaving those such as charities, who are offered significant benefits by exemptions, as the only organisations able to afford to be based there. The effect in many cases, especially in the food related market, where the outgoing stores put restrictions upon the premises to guard against incoming tenants from benefitting from their predecessors perceived customer loyalty, has simply added to the woes and we have seen the number of over-priced privately organised indoor markets develop to fill the gaps.

 

Ironically in 2012 the British Retail Consortium (BRC), representing the major retailers started to call foul over business rates. Ironic, because they have been significantly instrumental in creating the circumstances for their currently ridiculous heights. The effects are made worse for the MSE population who are, from my own published research, most likely to be negatively impacted by rateable values which further depletes their ranks. If the same circumstances had occurred in the earliest parts of the business life-cycle of Marks & Spencer, Tesco or Burton, who all famously began life as small businesses, then we would not see those international giants on the British stage today. The further irony of the BRC's position is that it is campaigning against the revaluation delay rather than a root and branch replacement of the NDR system. The postponement by HM Government of the regular five yearly cyclic revaluation due in 2013 in time for a new ratings list in 2015 is ostensibly for reasons of 'fairmess' and to enable businesses to more effectively plan their budgets. This is completley disingenuous since by delaying they retain the 2010 listings, based as on the cyclic revaluations of 2008, when the property market was booming, to ensure these artifically high valuations for a further two years, whilst continuing to annually increase the 'multiplier' that actually defines what each business will pay. Anyone who has followed these things will know that they actual cost of the NBR to a business increases each year throughout the currency of each ratings list (currently 2010 list (originally due to expire in 2015 but now extended to 2017)), except for those making successful appeals agianst their valuations - herein lays the principal reason behind the inherent disadvantage of SMEs within this arcane system. SMEs are very often afraid of the message by the Valuations Office Agency (the executive agency of the Treasury responsible for these things) which clearly states that the appeal might cause a rise in their valuations. Whereas by contrast, the larger groups employ skilled property professionals to ensure that their properties are most likely of all businesses (as my research has demonstrated) to actually have a reduced valuation.

 

Clearly the dominance of the larger former grocery chains in an increasingly diverse range of supply chains gives them significant potential advantage, but a skilled SME can work to develop their business in spite of that disadvantage, and may even, as I have proved in the past, obtain a sufficient buying power to obtain discounts that are sufficiently high to make a good return on investment. Similarly they can be good operators on-line, I can think of two seriously competitive SMEs who have a global reach by that very means by developing a unique service level and product. So I will contend that resolving the issues of occupancy in our town centres, allied to ensuring that the local planning authorities maintain their own policies of giving priority to the traditional high street are the primary keys to a renaissance - there is no shortage of potential retailers.

 

Our attention must then turn to the decision makers who have all too often demonstrated a quite disastrous lack of understanding of what their own town centres are all about. As a retailer I can tell you that it is not all about retailing! However, retailing is an important economic factor of every town centre and to ensure the success and the recycling of local capital it is incumbent upon planning authorities to ensure that they have carried out as much real research about their particular towns as is possible. In my own town they have a terrible plan that effectively says that they are going to turn an 'also ran' retail centre into something wondrous that will be an effective competitor with the already established regional out of town centre and the nearest city centres. As both a retailer and a geographer I know that this is complete nonsense since the gravitational effect of these centres is not going to be altered sufficiently to deflect the revenues and capital flows that will make this new centre viable. Consequently the plan is simply one that must fail. The town, does not have any real market intelligence to illustrate what the town ought to be doing, probably because it is so fixated on the bright lights that they believe will be the panacea to their failing town centre. The all-important community and cultural aspects of towns will be enhanced by a viable and effective retail offer, and that will only be achieved if the offer reflects the needs and aspirations of the catchment - that we can only discover by effective research into the market.

 

Finally, the regulations on planning need to be challenged. Every town seems now to have policies that prioritise the town centre as the place for retailing activity; there are notable cases that have occurred in parts of Lincolnshire and other places where that has not actually been sufficiently taken into consideration by the committees granting permissions, but that is not my poit (although it is a seriosu issue!). The problem is when a new project is put forward by a developer. They will ordinarily produce a retail impact assessment to both jsutify the new development by arguing a case that there is sufficient capacity, indeed that there is a need within the catchment for the proposal. Further, they will provide an assessment of how the new development will impact upon existing centres nearby and they will usually seek to emphasise how the town centre will benefit. Those where I have made a parallel assessment fall into two categories; the first where they are uncontentious and the assessment is neutral because the developer knows that it is uncontentious. Those where the proposal is deemed contentious, especially those concerning an edge of town development very often come supported by assessemtns that are unsurprisingly fully supportive of the scheme and demonstrate the potential economic benefits based on the assessement's figures. I have analysed a number of these and have been staggered at the lack of substance to a wide range of claims and projections that the developers put forward. In one that I helped challenge, I recalculated their own numbers and reached a completely different answer. The assessments were often full of unexplained jargon used simply to obfuscate the truth and to headline economic projections that were unrealsitic to the point of being downright lies. The elected members of at least one authority, being ill-informed, took these headlines as substantial and full justification for ignoring their own policies of town centre first. On threat of a judicial review the full council in this one case did make the committee look again, but the fact that it got to that very confusing stage is evidence of the need for more solid independent research to support the decisions of the council committees.

 

Further, the regulations need to be altered to ensure that any such assessment is measured to test the effectiveness of the methodolgies employed and perhaps the honesty of the developers. No such requirement is presently demanded, and in consequence the developer can happily promise to meet all of the council's ambitions and to meet the economic needs of the area. In the absence of any post-project measurement, the developer can go on to make the same promises elsewhere even when the first project has failed to meet its goals. The independent assessments should then go to inform a centrally held database, to provide all other councils with similar profile towns and proposals with the data that they require upon which to make effective decisions.

Well, that's the soap-box subject of a retailer with forty years experience that also has a passion for town centres and their dynamics and that has been trained as a geographer.

John Orchard