Transcript:
It is an absolute delight to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) for bringing forward this excellent Bill. The key word in the title of the Bill is “improvement” and, in my view, that is something we need on all levels. I see this more as a matrix that would bring forward all sorts of improvements to a town centre.
I will talk about Loughborough and Shepshed, because I have two towns in my constituency. Shepshed has recently received a large amount of section 106 funding, which has helped to improve the centre of the town, where there is new paving. That took a while to deliver, but it has lifted the town centre enormously, and Brook Street looks absolutely beautiful now.
We need to create a post-internet town centre for all the town centres throughout the country. Before the internet, people were prepared to walk around and browse a great deal and travel further along the town to get what they wanted. We need to create town centres that are more of a destination for entertainment, as well as for shopping and all the other social life aspects of a town centre, because that way we get a smaller footprint and a greater concentration of shops and facilities in an area, and the Bill will help to create that. I can see a future now for our town centres.
Through working with organisations such as business improvement districts—Love Loughborough, for example, is a superb organisation within the town centre—the Bill will help create an even greater focus on certain streets within a BID area. Of course, it is not about just the shopping area and the town centre itself, but picking out a certain street within the town, such as Nottingham Road, which is between Loughborough’s town centre and the station. We had an awful lot of investment in the station area when my noble Friend Baroness Morgan of Cotes was the Member of Parliament, and she attracted that funding. We then have the town centre, but in between there is a bit of a desert, and we need to be able to create something better. The Bill creates a good opportunity for that.
Creating that destination and looking at it as a matrix is not just about the shop frontage or the shops themselves, although those are extremely important, but about the state of the street and the places above those shops. That empty space can be used for flats and offices and so on, creating a whole ecosystem from just one street. The five-year focus on just one area will help to create a proper plan that everybody knows about and a proper strategy for that area, with everybody having a responsibility to help and engage with that, such as the police and providers of other facilities.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington mentioned antisocial behaviour, which can often deter older people from coming into town later in the evening, for example. Something can be done there. A particular street can change from daytime shopping to the evening. In Loughborough, that is when students come out and have a great time, frankly. In the meantime, there is a 5 pm to 10 pm twilight zone of tumbleweed, where not so many people are out and about. I would like to do something about that for people who are more my age, sadly, and a little bit older. They like to go out, have something to eat and drink, and then go back home before the night-time economy starts. I would like to be able to see that.
The Bill helps with those things, and it is absolutely superb. By being able to identify the landlords in a particular street, we can work with them to help promote any empty shops, perhaps with lower rents or rent-free periods. That kind of thing would also create the better promotion of an area. We have larger shops that were Woolworths or Wilkinson’s, but perhaps now we need smaller shops. If we did something along the lines of converting those larger shops, that would bring investment into towns.
All these things will create a particular focus, along with the high street rental auctions and so on that are already offered by the Minister and the Department. That variety and that opportunity will be absolutely superb. It certainly will be for Loughborough and Shepshed, and I am sure it will be for other towns across the country.
