Towns & Devolution

In recent years, a series of high-profile closures has put the decline of the high street firmly in the headlines. The travails of household names like Debenhams, House of Fraser, Toys R Us, Mothercare, and many more have sparked renewed interest in what can be done to turnaround fortunes on the high street, as one in ten shops remains vacant.

Much of the focus has been on the thorny issue of business rates, with more than 50 of Britain’s largest retailers calling for fundamental reform of the system this summer. Clearly, there are big problems with the way the business rates system works – not least the fact that increasingly cash-strapped local authorities now greatly rely on business rates income, meaning any reform would also have to address issues around local government financing. But more significantly, focusing on rates assumes that the problem we are trying to fix is retail.

We cannot unwind patterns of online retail and consumer preferences for more locally grounded, independent services and experiences. We have to move to a new model in which high streets are places for us to congregate, to interact and to live our lives – places of entrepreneurialism, business and trading, yes – but also places of citizenship, not just commerce. Central to the emergence of this new model is a simple idea: that communities themselves are best placed to rebuild their high streets.

Our work at Power to Change in support of community businesses has highlighted the raw economic value of communities taking the lead. Community businesses can grow the local economy from within, harnessing the entrepreneurial talents of local people to revitalise the high street. In areas of significant disadvantage and dereliction, a community-led approach can create a much needed economic turnaround in the absence of significant interest from private developers and commercial businesses. Our new research estimates that there are at least 6,300 community-owned buildings and green spaces, including a significant number on the high street. Together, they contribute £220 million to UK Gross Value Added. And by employing local people and using other local businesses in their supply chains, 56p of every £1 they spend stays in the local economy.

There are hundreds of examples of community businesses and other types of community organisation bringing new energy and vitality to high streets and town centres. In the White Rock area of Hastings, a group of community-led organisations have between them taken ownership of seven derelict properties over the last five years. One, Rock House, has already been successfully brought back into use as a vibrant and financially viable hub combining a community kitchen, work space, community meeting space and affordable housing. The rest will be reimagined over the next few years to meet the needs of local people, working in partnership with local independent businesses in the White Rock area to create mutual benefit.

And in Anfield, Homebaked – a community-led bakery and community land trust – now owns the entire derelict terrace on which the bakery is based and are redeveloping it as a mix of commercial space, affordable homes and workspaces. Down the same street, Kitty’s Laundrette has recently opened, combining affordable, environmentally-friendly laundry facilities with a space for community activities. Working together, Kitty’s and Homebaked plan to regenerate the whole street which lies between them.

However, a number of barriers get in the way. Rents remain stubbornly high, even where there are large numbers of vacant units, locking out community businesses and other locally-minded organisations which might restore a sense of local pride and identity to a place. This would be less of a problem if communities were more often owners on the high street, but opaque and fragmented ownership, coupled with financial barriers, makes it a challenge for communities to shape their own high streets. Finally, current approaches to local economic priority setting means that community organisations do not have an equal voice at the planning table. They are consulted but are not decision-makers with real influence to shape how the high street evolves.

To ensure that communities can play their part, we need to make it easier for communities to become owners and influencers on the high streets.

To begin with, there are a number of changes that could be made to local economic planning, such as including community representatives in the governance of Business Improvement Districts and ensuring technical support for neighbourhood planning extends to cover town centre vitality.

There is also a strong case for the extension of the Right to Bid under the Localism Act 2011 to a powerful new Community Right to Buy. This extension would give specifically defined communities priority rights to buy land in which they have registered an interest, and a generous window of opportunity to raise the funds necessary to meet the price of the land as determined by an independent valuation. In addition, the new Community Right to Buy should include the right for communities to force the sale of a building or land if it is in a state of significant disrepair or neglect and is contributing to the decline of a neighbourhood.

To tackle financial barriers to ownership, Government should earmark £300 million of the additional funding announced for the Stronger Towns Fund to support community-led organisations to take on buildings and land that matter to them in their town centres over the next five years. This funding should include initial feasibility funding, capital funding for building purchase and, critically, revenue funding to support the early running costs of the building. To support communities to make best use of this fund, the new High Streets Task Force should provide access to capacity building for community organisations that successfully secure funding. An additional £10 million should be made available to the High Streets Task Force to provide this support.

For too long, not just in the high streets debate but across the broad sweep of economic regeneration policy, community empowerment has been seen as a nice thing to have in addition to the supposedly more serious business of tax reform, Whitehallled industrial strategy and so on. In fact, empowering communities is the most serious thing we can do in response to the decline of our high streets. Because when people take real control over the places where they live, that is when genuinely transformative change can take place.

Vidhya Alakeson is the founding Chief Executive of Power to Change. This article first appeared in our Centre Write magazine On the home front. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue. 

I have spent a lot of time in the past six years thinking about the excessive dependence of the UK economy on the performance of London and the surrounding South East areas, originally being asked to chair an independent review into how to invigorate other major British cities. This Cities Growth Commission appeared to be a big influence on the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and our ideas played quite a role in the conception of the Northern Powerhouse, as well as the separate issue of devolving decision making away from Westminster to major urban areas.

In that Commission, and much of the subsequent focus of thinking of mine, the prime areas of attention were larger metropolitan areas of at least 500,000 residents. This was done, not because we didn’t care about smaller cities, towns or rural areas, but simply because we were tasked with coming up with ideas that could boost national economic growth, and the evidence strongly suggested that if you could boost the economic performance of these 14 metro areas while not weakening that of London and the South East, indeed the overall trend growth performance of the UK could be improved.

When thinking about smaller towns, villages and rural areas, it is the case that if all of them around all the UK could also see their general vibrancy uplifted, then this would also boost national economic performance, but there are thousands of these, and unless you can positively change a large majority of them, it likely wouldn’t influence the overall national economy. This observation is often not something many wish to focus on, but in my view, it is a harsh reality. If accepted, it would allow a more rational discussion of what to do about these smaller, so-called ‘left-behind’ places.

At the same time, what is similarly true, as evidenced by the 2016 EU referendum, is that even if you can’t think of policies to help all these smaller places that would make as much difference as policies for 14 metro areas, it is rather dangerous to not think about them. While there remain endless discussions about what caused citizens to vote to leave the European Union, it is reasonably clear that it was not led by those living in London or other major metro areas. So it is definitely important for policymakers to think about new policies on place as it relates to less populated areas.

Hence, let me concentrate on towns, but to some extent, the ideas may be applicable to even smaller conurbations.

Let me also make a clear distinction between those towns that lie close to major metro areas from those that are more isolated, such as coastal towns, or other more remote locations. It is clear to me that policymakers should make this distinction when thinking about towns close to Greater London, or within the Northern Powerhouse, or even the so-called Midlands Engine.

In principle, towns that are commutable to London, or geographically lie within the Northern Powerhouse or the Midlands Engine, should play a crucial, indeed, central role to the broader agglomeration theory that underpins the economic case for them. Indeed, as can be observed readily in towns not too geographically distant from London, for example Guildford, they have obvious benefits to many people that enjoy active working lives in the heart of London.

The core of the Northern Powerhouse is the region that is bounded between the metro areas of Leeds, Sheffield to the east, Liverpool to the west, and Manchester, centrally. Including all the towns and villages in between as well as those cities, this totals around eight million people. If policies can be done to allow this whole area to function as one economic unit, both as consumers and producers, then all the smaller towns would benefit immensely. Barnsley, Doncaster, Oldham, Warrington and so on, all stand to benefit just as much as Manchester itself, if done properly. This is why, of course, the Northern Powerhouse Rail is so central to the concept. And equally importantly is what we used to call the ‘Noyster’ at the Cities Commission: a system for allowing seamless and affordable travel around the Northern Powerhouse.

There is also the topic of young people from towns that, understandably want to disappear off to universities. If the Northern Powerhouse develops credible traction, and young ambitious people feel they can develop a fulfilling and rewarding career, then some of these towns could become the Guildfords of the Northern Powerhouse in the future. Similarly, the path of disappearing off to a university, then finding the first job in London, and then disappearing to London for the rest of one’s active life, can be broken. Indeed, I detect the faintest of signs that this might be happening a bit, at least around the Manchester and Leeds areas.

I often think, in this regard, the N8 entity, that informally links the historically regarded best northern English universities, could play a much more dynamic and forceful role in pursuing some related goals for the success of the Northern Powerhouse, and indirectly and also directly, help more the towns located nearby.

It is undoubtedly tougher for towns that are more remote, including those in the North. Many of these proud places, historically vibrant due to manufacturing industry or coastal tourism, need to take a good hard analytical look at themselves, and objectively articulate what is their modern ‘edge’? Feeling sorry for themselves because they have been on the wrong end of major global, and perhaps domestic, forces won’t really succeed.

Trying to position yourself in a different way is the right path. Carlisle I think, which is very isolated from the major urban centres of the north, has started to have some success. It has persuaded policymakers to think of it as being in the centre of the ‘Borderlands’ area and has managed to attract government funding for some new ideas that go with this. Most recently, Stockport, long a town felt bypassed by Manchester’s success, has decided to become more ambitious and has some truly exciting ideas about recreating its central areas. I am sure there must be many others.

Lord O’Neill is the Vice Chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. This article first appeared in our Centre Write magazine On the home front. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue. 

Somewhere, somehow, over the last century we dropped beauty, mislaid it, and forgot that we needed to pick it up again. The great visionaries who created the National Trust, the Garden Cities movement and who took the first halting steps to what became the Town and Country Planning Act were not afraid of beauty. When Octavia Hill campaigned to save common land or to provide housing for the poor she sought to protect or provide “beauty… for the refreshment of our souls.” When Clough Williams-Ellis penned his ground-breaking polemic against 1920s ribbon development, England and the Octopus, he wished that “a happy awareness of beauty about us should… be the everyday condition of us all.”

This confidence, this surety of everyday beauty as a worthwhile aim, not as the only thing that matters but as something critically over-arching and aspirational was not without legislative consequences. In Parliament, the 1909 Planning Act was defined as being “to secure the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified and the suburb salubrious.”

But how do you measure beauty? How is beauty defined? Who’s defining it? Difficult questions that architects, philosophers and poets have debated for millennia. But they have always been difficult. What has changed is our reaction to the challenge. Even if we cannot fully and always agree about what we find beautiful, the process of debating and discussing it can lift our collective sights and help us strive for better things. The problem is that we are not even trying any more. The former head of the National Trust, Fiona Reynolds has written: “Today to talk of beauty in policy circles risks embarrassment: it is felt both to be too vague a word, lacking precision and focus and, paradoxically given its appeal by contrast with official jargon, elitist. Yet in losing the word ‘beauty’ we have lost something special from our ability to shape our present and our future.”

She is right. And we need to change this. The good news is that I think we can. First of all, the Government is now thinking about this. Earlier this year they set up the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission, which I am co-chairing alongside Sir Roger Scruton.

Second, it is increasingly being recognised how pernicious is the old lie ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ Simple clichés are dangerous things. And this one has probably done more harm than most. In fact, polling, focus group, psychological and pricing data is consistent and compelling on the types of homes, places and towns that most people want to live in and find attractive most of the time. The precise nuances and relative weightings vary from time to time and place to place. There may even be generational patterns. However, the types of place, even adjusting for wealth and health, which we aesthetically prefer, in which most of us feel happier and whose creation we are more likely to support, are remarkably consistent in most research. The social enterprise that I founded and run, Create Streets, exists to carry out this research and to support its practical application by neighbourhoods and landowners, councils and developers.

So what do we like? For our book, Of Streets and Squares, we’ve recently been using a uniquely wide data set to research the types of streets and squares that people actually like and the ones they actively avoid. We polled over two thousand people with carefully controlled images. And we ‘dropped’ a visual preference algorithm developed at the Turing Institute and trained by 1.5 million responses to over 200,000 images, into just under 19,000 streets and squares in six British cities. Could we find patterns in the types of places people like by comparing the scores of the algorithm with the ‘big data’ on our cities? You bet we could.

Take London, one of the six cities we investigated. The types of place that came out top were very consistent. Old fashioned squares and beautiful walkable streets with a rich diversity of uses. They had some greenery but also a sense of enclosure (buildings about as wide as the street was tall). They had ‘gentle density’ half-way between the extremes of tower block and extended suburbia. They also had what we call the ‘narrow fronts, many doors’ model. No long blank walls but frequent front doors and windows. Similar patterns emerged in our visual preference surveys with Ipsos MORI.

Urban designers often tell us that buildings don’t matter, ‘it’s the space in between.’ And volume housebuilders tell us that people aspire to the drive-to cul-desacs they churn out. They’re both wrong. The least popular places and the lowest scoring images in our polling were defined by lakes of tarmac and sheer, grey, faceless buildings. Drive to cul-de-sac streets scored pretty badly too. People recoil from streets without colour, a sense of place, variety in pattern or a coherent complexity of windows and doors in a near symmetrical pattern.

When, six years ago, Create Streets started making this case we were largely ridiculed by the design and planning professions. That is now changing. Rationality is breaking out. If local councils want to boost the wellbeing of a Brexitperturbed populace the answer is staring them in the face. Ask what people find beautiful. You’ll get remarkable agreement from rich to poor, from north to south. And then support that though planning policy, not walls of glass or repetitive ugliness.

Nicholas Boys Smith is the Director of Create Streets and co-chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. This article first appeared in our Centre Write magazine On the home front. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue. 

If Boris Johnson is serious about living up to his chosen title as ‘Minister for the Union’, he faces an extraordinary challenge.

Not only must he steer what he dubs the ‘awesome foursome’ through the acute and immediate challenges of Brexit and a belated rise in separatist support. He needs also to combat the failing “more powers” orthodoxy which has brought the Union to its current parlous state – and articulate an alternative vision to replace it.

Since the advent of devolution in the 1990s, unionists have had one approach when it comes to the separatists: keep making concessions and hope that, at some point, the ‘new United Kingdom’ is enough for the SNP.

It has not worked. Devolution promised, from a unionist perspective, to “kill nationalism stone dead”. Moving power was supposed to assuage separatist feeling and even deliver better government. It has instead created whole political ecosystems which derive salaries, sinecures, and status from the new institutions, and gear themselves towards manufacturing support for and then constantly pressing one demand: “more powers”.

Should this process be allowed to continue, the destination is almost certainly the eventual dissolution of the United Kingdom. It shares with the example of the European Union the dynamic of politicians shifting blame onto it to distract from local problems, but whereas we spent decades more tightly integrating with Europe – thus making departure a complex and difficult business – we have spent that same time unpicking the UK.

We have now genuinely reached a point where even some ‘pro-Union’ politicians argue that the UK, a country, be less closely integrated than the EU. That is the implication of the Government’s retreat over ‘post-Brexit devolved powers’, which saw devolved politicians and their parliamentary confederates insist that powers which have until now been pooled in Brussels cannot be pooled in London. Johnson must forcefully reject such reasoning.

So, what form should a full-throated Government fightback take? It needs to have short-term, medium-term, and long-term elements.

In the short term, the Prime Minister must immediately begin working on strategies for victory for potential referendums in either Scotland or Northern Ireland during the 2020s. Research must be commissioned and acted upon, data and other campaign essentials built up, messages and messengers tested.

In the medium-term, the Government must set itself to better integrating the United Kingdom and making the Union harder to pick apart. Ministers’ first-hand experiences of trying to unpick the European Union ought to have given them plenty of ideas. This effort must be given institutional life, at the very least as a dedicated Cabinet Office unit, and every department should be required to cooperate with it and contribute to a government-wide Union strategy.

(Suffice to say the maintenance of pan-UK institutions also means maintaining the Conservative Party as a country-wide political force and rejecting a split.)

The long-term challenge is the hardest, but the most important: the PM must try to start the revival of the British nation. Talk about the ‘awesome foursome’ and ‘our union of nations’ is all very well, but it ignores the crucial idea that Britain is itself a nation too. That is why so many people (but not enough) identify, either partly or indeed wholly, as ‘British’.

A British state will not survive without a British nation to underpin it. Political consent for the realities of union, be that pooled decision-making or fiscal transfers, depends upon a sense of fellow-feeling between all its citizens. Without it, any case for the United Kingdom will be entirely mercenary, and contingent upon economic circumstances which will eventually change. Just ask the Stronger In campaign how that goes.

The good news is that all of these campaigns can support the other. Affection for Britain is withering in part because the British dimension of political and cultural life has dwindled. If these trends are to be reversed, they can, and perhaps must, be reversed in tandem.

Views expressed in this article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue. Image licensed under the Open Government Licence v1.0.