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Future of Town Centres and High Streets

My hon. Friend makes an extremely sensible point. For far too long, we have not thought about the people who want to drive into our town centres and we have not considered the quality and availability of car parking. We have certainly not considered its cost, which I shall come to later. It is extremely prohibitive and is one reason why there is not a level playing field for our town centres in relation to their out-of-town competitors. In my constituency, Nuneaton town centre has fared reasonably well, and better than many. There is a property vacancy rate of about 6% while the national average is 11.1%, although the factors I have mentioned account for a vacancy creep that is happening at different rates across the country. Many of the factors in my analysis of the reasons for decline may be a little simplistic, but what we do to arrest that terminal decline is far from simple.