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Local High Streets

I am grateful to have the pleasure of speaking in the debate, Mr Gray, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on securing it. This is an important debate for a constituency such as mine, which has a collection of village high streets and three market towns. I think that I can still refer to them as market towns, as all three have markets, but I suspect that by the end of my term here, I will have to call them supermarket towns. One new supermarket opened in my first six months as an MP, and the threat of another couple in the other two towns is further damaging the high streets. Perhaps one of the great pleasures of being an MP is supporting ““shop local”” campaigns. When my girlfriend says, with apologies to the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson), ““Can we go to the Westfield centre in Derby?”” or, ““How about Meadowhell?””—sorry, I think I am meant to say ““Meadowhall””—I can say, ““No, we need to shop local.”” I had great pleasure taking her out to Ripley on Sunday to spend far too much money on jewellery. It seems that we have legalised product placement, and with the number of lists of shops that have been cited in this debate, perhaps some of us are having a try at that here. To return to my point, I have three market towns in my constituency: Alfreton, Heanor and Ripley. I am giving nothing away when I say that they all have challenges to face. As other hon. Members have mentioned, we have empty shops, pubs and business premises, and bits of land that have been set aside for bypasses that will never happen. There is no magic easy fix for such problems. None the less, those towns now have glossy regeneration plans—the previous Government insisted upon them—with have 100-page booklets full of glossy pictures. I am a little suspicious, because the plans are very similar for each town, with a slightly different road map to reflect the historic roads. Fundamentally, we are several tens of millions of pounds short of achieving those plans. Perhaps we need to think a little more strategically about what a town should look like and how it should be changed and sorted out. There is a risk that everyone looks at a town and tries to do the same thing. We tend to think, ““How do we get the shops back to where they were 30 years ago? How do we get independent shops to come back here when they have practically all left, and how do we reopen that pub?”” We may need to go beyond that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) mentioned, and accept that things have changed and that we do want to shop at supermarkets. I suspect that we are all guilty of getting back at 9 o'clock at night and of doing our shopping when only the supermarket is open. It is much easier to do that than to go down the high street during opening hours. People exercise their right to choose, so we need to find a plan for our towns that lives in the real world and applies to the future world, and that does not try to take us back 30 or 40 years to what used to work then. There are things that national and local government can do to encourage the change. I am pleased with some of the things that the new Government are doing. We must ensure that planning control is actually about planning rather than development. We must look at what we want to have in each town, where we want it and how we get it. When I look around at least one of my towns, all I see are rows of betting shops, takeaways and charity shops. They are not great for the vibrancy of a town. One of the ways in which we can reduce the number of betting shops in a row is to allow them to have more than four slot machines. The problem is we may then have two empty betting shops rather than two full units. Councils should have the planning power to say, ““No, we have enough betting shops and takeaways; we want something different.””