How will the high street fare - new planning rules coming

 

One obvious effect of the coronavirus epidemic has been an accelerating trend of businesses leaving the high street, either through a decision to go on-line only or, more often, through insolvency.  

When insolvency beckons the remains tend to be picked over by on-line retailers: most recently Asos has bought the Topshop, Topman and Mis Selfridge brands from the failed Acadia; its Evans brand was bought by City Chic and Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burtons look like being bought by BooHoo.  None of these have expressed an interest in retaining the shopping estate and therefore some 12,000 jobs and around 500 shops are likely to go as a result.  All without taking into account the knock-on effect that the loss of these, often anchor, shops and the associated jobs will have on neighbouring businesses.

The government is now reviewing the comments made on its proposals to reform planning: “Supporting housing delivery and public service infrastructure”.  One of the major effects of its proposals would be to allow offices and shops to be turned into residential accommodation without the need for planning permission and therefore without local government control.  Government sees this as a significant way to boost housing stock and re-purpose disused shops.

There is considerable doubt however as to whether this will simply make matters worse.  A vibrant community is not made by cutting the heart out of its shopping centre and removing any effective control by the local authority developers will have an effective carte blanche to do what they will*.

There is no doubt on-line shopping is here to stay, but in many respects is less environmentally friendly than local shopping:  not least that it involves significantly more transportation and packaging.  But worse, the closure of high street arcades could move more shopping to bigger out-of-town units with lower operating costs and lower rates, just at the time we are seeking to reduce car usage.

Whilst outside the remit of the planning consultation, if the government wishes to keep city centres alive and compete with on-line retail, it is going to have to look at a radical reform of rates and business taxes.  A growing lobby of businesses are pressing for this and it is likely that only the combination of COVID-19 and Brexit has pushed it out of urgent consideration to date.  But COVID-19 is now making a change ever more urgent, so expect to see something in a future budget.

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* I wrote our local area’s response to these proposals, the summary of which are here.