High ST and Mary Portas

[noddyholder]

I really think her ideas are a load of new labour style spin with more than a sprinkling of baloney!The high st has slowly died off because of online shopping nothing else. No strategic town centre team can change that. Making them social? I think that is what the bulk of people are doing coffee shops are rammed they don't need any help from what I see. Most people I know have shopped online this year. I have done a combination of both and generally only use the high st for things for myself that I need to see. She really gets on my wick!

It's kind of ironic that Mary Portas has a PR company that has the Westfield Shopping Hell account.

I think the elephant in the room is the fact that there were (and still are) a lot of very poor small shops around. Surly service used to be the absolute norm in a lot of places (not everywhere). Loads of shops sold really quite crappy stock. I remember in the 80s when shopping malls started sprouting up: it was a relief tbh to finally have a place where capitalism made sense. Of course we're seeing the backlash now.

Another thing is that especially in 'historic' streets (that's half of Britain really) a small shop can be absolutely tiny and the rent high because of location and potential footfall. In some places shops are rented on a lease which can mean that the tenant pays for all repairs, even to the fabric of the building (eg roof when renting just a room at the bottom of the building). So small businesses find it hard to grow and quite soon go under before people have even learned that they're there.

Because shops for rent in high-traffic high street areas are often teeny tiny, it means that only certain types of business can move in and make a go of it. I do want to shop in small local businesses, but I don't want to buy scented candles or exquisite knick knacks, I want to buy groceries and hardware - but the square footage is a problem for those types of businesses, who need to compete with big stores.

No market stalls would encourage me to go to the high street. I never see anything I want to buy on the little crafty market stalls plus they are expensive, and with clothes I want to be able to try things on in a nice environment, and know I can return it if I change my mind when I get home.
I like the high street and do generally shop there as I find getting stuff delivered a real hassle (that would be your fault yodel). However I am unlikely to use the samller independent shops, as I do not always buy near where I live so want to flexibility of a chain, as welll as their returns policy.
However the last couple of years I have notice that i buy less "normal gifts" than normal, and have instead decided to give me experiences like theatre tickets, concert tickets, cinema vouchers etc and things like magazine subscriptions which I do online and cannot do on the high street. Maybe more people are doing this as we start to focus on our time rather than possesions. Also many children now want games or music which are ordered via itunes, and so cut down shops like HMV and other shops that catered for 12 and upwards ages. It is very difficult to convert that into soemthign you can do on the high street.

From her report she seemed to think that the high street would survive if it turned itself into a big craft market, and we would all flock to buy homemade bathbombs at £6 a shot. But that is not going to happen in reality.

limited, but the 20% VAT means things only increase by about 2p in the pound compared to before Brown reduced it.

kelly2000 little things count. I'm not saying it's the only thing but it's just one more burden for retailers. And it is not gathering more money for the Treasury, in fact because of the fear out there, it's gathering less. I agree with your views on Portas's apparent idea that we all want to buy bath bombs from markets. I don't.

cogito I agree that many people now shop around for essential items. I also agree that retailers who offer value for money, which is not alway the same thing as cheap, are hanging on.

But people are nervous of buying big-ticket items or even mid-ticket items because they are terrified of losing their jobs. I'm not saying it's Osborne and King's role to encourage people to spend money rashly but it would be nice if they could avoid obliterating confidence and growth.

My beef with Portas is that she is telling those skilled retailers hanging on by the skin of their teeth how to suck eggs when she has no experience of owning or managing a small retail business and therefore no idea of the realities of that kind of high street trade.

She lived in a bubble as a senior employee at Harvey Nichols in their boom of the early to mid-nineties. There are some talented people who work for similar companies. However I have seen many others in action at quality clothing trade fairs.

The economic climate has made large stores tighten up but when Portas was at Harvey Nichols international fashion trade fairs were a huge jolly. To some people at upmarket retailers they still are.

If they make stupid decisions over buying they may eventually lose their jobs. That may be career-ending these days but within the last 20 years I've seen truly useless people with very good CVs and job titles seamlessly moving from one luxury goods retailer to another.

But if you're spending your own money and you buy the wrong stock, or maybe even the right stock for the wrong price, or maybe even the right stock at the right price but the weather is unexpectedly wrong you lose your business.

That's why I would take the views of an independent high street retailer over hers any day.

limitedperiodonly I did read your point - I?m not sure you read mine though. Let's start at the top. Mary Portas was commissioned (rightly or wrongly) by the government to shoot her mouth off create a report about the state of Britain's High Streets. One can safely infer from this that the government already considers the High Street to be in trouble. I would contend that this is part of a long term (at least predating New Labour in '97) trend whereby big businesses are leaving the middle of our towns and relocating to large out of town supermarkets and malls. Hopefully nothing I've written so far is too controversial!

Unfortunately, if my premise above is correct, there must be a different reason for this phenomenon other than the recent hike in VAT rates or even consumer confidence. At this point, our personal experience of VAT and the effect on shopper?s footfall and whether 20% is over the crest of the Laffer curve (I happen to think it is and therefore you are correct BTW) is all moot.

So the question that naturally arises is what is the best way of reversing this trend and making town centres more attractive places to shop in? I maintain that the arseache of having to park in a multi-storey car park, coupled with the excessive costs of doing this, and adding in the fact that the shops are typically smaller, more expensive and hold fewer product lines than their out of town rivals means that there is little incentive to visit the town centres in the first place. This reduced footfall chokes off the few stores that choose to stay in the town centre and eventually they get replaced by another charity shop, estate agent or Starbucks.

I believe that the best hope for town centres is to make visiting them a lot easier for the punter and to make it cheaper to open a shop for the businessman. Hence my original point about making parking cheaper and reducing the business rates / rents.

Doing this means the council ends up with less revenue but, with all due respect, if they hadn't tried to milk Joe Public or the shopkeepers for so much for so long, the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place.

Agree with most of limited's posts. Also want to re-iterate that local councils collect Business Rates but do not keep them - the money goes to central government. Therefore councils do not set high rates for their own benefit - it is all set centrally.
There was a time when councils got back some of the rates in the form of grants from central gov but , as we all know, these grants have been cut to the bone. Even when it did happen there was a significant amount of redistribution from wealthy shires to urban areas - hardly fair on the businesses. With funding at councils very low they are naturally looking at revenue raisers - and that includes parking. Also there is no such thing as free parking in the sense that someone has to pay to maintain the car parks.
Some of Mary's ideas make sense but are not new. But nowhere in her recommendations does she state who will pay. 'Town Teams' need managing - who will do that? - who will pay them? How do you cover the costs of things as simple as meetings? - you have to factor in meeting room hire, minute taking and distribution before you even get to the cost of buying things like market stalls.

MrPants there are many areas where we are in agreement though I do not think it was unreasonable of me to bridle at your high-handed tone. And you did miss my points.

Nevertheless, yes, out of town shopping centres pre-date 1997. We can trace them back to 1979 when the planning laws began to be relaxed so that developers could build retail parks on the outskirts of towns.

It was no coincidence that the developers were major donors to the Conservative Party. The then Government even put the ultimate decision over planning disputes into the hands of the Environment Secretary, meaning that though residents and local authorities had objected and been backed at a public inquiry, the developer could go to the Environment Secretary to push the decision through. More often than not it was.

I do not think that everything the Conservatives do is evil. But I think that with the benefit of hindsight, that was a bad decision. Labour has made them to when in pursuit of donations.

And the hindsight is for us because I expect politicians of any colour to look beyond selfish short termism. That's not going to happen, though, is it?

High Streets were doomed from then on and shoppers are now doomed to spend hours in traffic jams, with all the expense that entails, on often very inadequate roads visiting an increasingly mediocre product.

I'm not going to blame people for wanting to shop for a wide range of goods under cover - who wants to get rained on - but the developers of the malls should have been required to ensure a varied mix of retailer and a range of rents. It's not hard to do. It's called planning gain, as I'm sure you're aware.

I agree with your comments about parking charges, but as idling says (thanks idling, btw) where is the money for essential services going to come from? Portas hasn't addressed that and I think that's because her customers, the Government, wouldn't have liked it.

I did ask you why you thought she was silent on awkward issues. I also asked you if you were a retailer with hands-on knowledge or an observer.

I live in Westminster. I have never voted Conservative but I am happy with the way the borough is run. I think their plans to extend evening and weekend parking charges will be disastrous for retail and entertainment businesses in the West End and beyond.

But I'd also like my bins emptied. Would Portas and this Government like to explain where the money's going to come from?

limitedperiodonly thanks for the reply - to address your specific points, I do run a business (engineering consultancy) so I am VAT registered, however, I am happy to concede that as a retailer you will have a better idea on how VAT rates affect footfall on the High Street - from my perspective I saw no difference, nor can I see how changing the VAT rates affects town / city centre businesses disproportionately.

Mary Portas was asked to provide an opinion, not to do the treasury's job for them - under those circumstances she has fulfilled her remit. Where she to have suggested making cuts in spending elsewhere she would have been castigated for that.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm a libertarian - hopefully that should be enough to explain that what I consider 'essential services' to be is very different from what most people would consider essential services to be. Suffice to say that if (local) government cost less there wouldn't be the need to screw the consumer / tax payer quite so much in the first place. Don't even get me going on refuse collection!

You mention that the out of town builds should have been planned to include presumably smaller business premises to allow for a greater mix of businesses - surely that would have killed the High Street even quicker.

As for short termist politicos in this country, you are bang on the money.

It was not the fact that the government allowed out of town shopping centres to be built that was the problem, but the fact that people chose to use them. The idea that we should eb forced to shop in the high street is not fair. If someone prefers to use out of twon shopping, or online shopping that is their choice, and it is up to the high street to tempt them back rather than force them back.

Most of Mary portas ideas are only relevant to affluent market towns. Out door markets will not revive the majority of our town centres. The main reason for the decline in town centres is the out of town shopping which developed in the 1980s and continues today's even thou the government knows how harmful it is to town centres. For example, why have they allowed the new Westfield to be built when they know that it will result in the decline of surrounding shops?

People like the convenience of parking close to where the shops are and most town centres do not have convenient parking. I don't see a problem in paying to park in large town centres but parking at small parades should be free to encourage people to just pop to the shops. I know that I am sometimes guilty of going to tesco for a pint of milk just because I know I will be able to park easily.

How to resolve this??

No more out of town shops.
No extensions or mezzanine floors to out of town stores.
Large stores like tesco should not have it so easy.

Really, I don't know what the solution is now that we have so many malls. Most high streets now are not welcoming places to be. With the affluent shoppers in the malls, the high streets have a higher concentration of tramps, drinkers etc as the shopping malls are private and have security staff, and all the closed shops and pound shops have created an off putting environment for many.

Shrinking disposable incomes might have something to do with it, but I didnt see any proposal to address that.

For me the main thing that keeps me away from the High Street is having ot pay for parking - I'd rather drive a few miles further and park for free at an out of town shopping centre. I also find that a lot of the things that a web site has will not be in the same actual shop - I have driven to Cheltenham or Bristol everal times to try on something I've seen on line, only to find it not in stock - after these experiences I tend to buy on line and return if it is no what I expected.