How does this impact on Community Wellbeing? It seems ridiculous to have so many vacant shops in town centres but then the go ahead is given to build retail parks. Retail parks are very car centric so their existence just encourages more cars on the road which most people say, and government policy is to reduce such traffic. Why don’t the private land lords of these vacant properties reduce the rent to encourage take up? Properties will lie vacant for years, how is that economical? Introduce some law to make these landlords reduce rent. Perhaps award local councils a budget to buy up vacant properties so they can control the rent. To encourage diversity, new businesses should have a reduced rate incrementally. Any business that is independent (not part of a big chain) should also receive incentives to encourage them back to town centres. Why should the Committee focus on this as part of their future work? You cannot have a community when amenities are spread across a wide area. You need to be bold and do better by people, and small businesses. You need to level the playing field for town centres as they try to compete with retail parks and online. It is not difficult to see small measures that can be taken to inject life back into town centres. Don’t spend money on vanity projects that overwork an area. Think more practically and longer term.
This content is created by the open source Your Priorities citizen engagement platform designed by the non profit Citizens Foundation