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Local High Streets

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. One thing that councils should have the power to do is to say, ““Right, we want this town to be a focus for restaurants or for small shops.”” They should be able to choose whatever is right for that town and look at how they can encourage that. We have heard talk of granting business rate discounts, and that is certainly something that we can do. We can grant a holiday for the first year, or half rate for a few years, to give businesses a chance to establish themselves. We can try to streamline the planning system so that we can say, ““If you want to convert this empty shop or that void into this kind of outlet, we will guarantee that you can get that planning permission.”” That would speed up the process and take out some of the costs. Let us look at practical measures. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) talked about trying to rig together freehold ownership. I know that towns have a problem with the numerous different owners in the high street—they might have banks owning closed branches, a few pub landlords owning pubs that are boarded up, individuals who own shops but cannot be found, and a couple of obscure trusts. We must try to find a way in which we can bring that together. Perhaps we could consider innovative land swaps. Councils might have valuable land outside the town that could be attractive for out-of-town parking, while someone's land in the centre could be used to regenerate the town. We need to get a critical mass of ideas together so that we can do something rather than thinking, ““I can fix two of these 27 outlets, but I still have problem with the other 25.”” I shall now address car parking, which is probably a poisoned chalice. Anyone who talks to small shopkeepers or owners of small businesses will know that they say that they cannot compete with supermarkets, because supermarkets can give free parking to all their shoppers, whereas the customers of small shops have to park half a mile away down a hill, and pay various rates for that privilege. They say that they just cannot compete with supermarket parking for either convenience or cost. The situation is difficult, because councils want the revenue from car parking, and it must be right that car parks are maintained—we want safe, clean, well-lit car parks, and the cost of such maintenance must come from somewhere. However, one of the things that kills town centres is that people just do not want to pay the £1 or £2 they are charged to park in them. When people are spending £5 on petrol to get to a town centre, it is hard to believe that the 50p for parking will put them off, but if anyone looks at the cars along a free-parking residential street, it clearly does. We need to take a strategic view. If we are going to save our town centres, we need to think, ““What can we bring here that will be viable and self-perpetuating? What can we do to help people to come here, even if we cannot chuck millions of pounds at it? What do we need to do to get the infrastructure, parking and public transport access right, and the pavements well lit and attractive?”” If we try to bring those things together and create the right conditions, we can make this plan work. I am afraid that the time for trying to find a one-size-fits-all approach and an attitude of saying, ““Let's go back to the 1960s high street””—great as that might be—has now passed.