There have been quite a few heated debates about the health of local high streets and how they can be transformed. Ideas vary from using some premises as housing, to using property to encourage arts to start-up businesses. But there has been little consensus on how the government and councils, with the aid of businesses, can revamp and relaunch the high street. The Government did commission the Mary Portas Review, but this appears to have had little of the desired effect. The only agreement thus far is that we cannot go on with such high rent and rates and something has got to give.
This unhealthy backdrop has lead to some tensions and disagreements on the high street. At times charity retailers are often used as an example of how they ‘blight’ the high street. Most recently this was highlighted by a proposal by the Welsh Government in its proposed changes to business rates. Some of which included cutting rate relief for all charity shops from 80% to 50%. The Charity Retail Association, a not-for-profit organisation that represents and lobbies on behalf of the charity retail sector, believes if such cuts would affect jobs, charity shops would close and several million would be lost from charity income. And according to the article on the BBC website, that covered this story, there are only 512 charity shops in Wales. All this for 512 shops, it seems a little excessive.
If you dig a little deeper into the stats for Britain, you can see there are around 430,000 shops in the UK. Of those there are around 8,500 charity shops. So around 2% are charity shops. By persecuting a small percentage of shops, which actually support and help the local communities within which they are based seems nonsensical. And it has no effect on resolving or saving our high streets.
So rather than looking to save a little money here or there, that actually ends up costing the local area much more in the long run, isn’t it time there was a real consensus on what can be done to transform the high street. Yes the high street has to change, and many may shrink, as there appears to be over capacity. But all parties should work together to find a viable solution that helps local economies and high streets rather than look to apportion blame or persecute the minority.
