“Over the Easter period I have visited a couple of our Cathedral cities. I was unhappy but not surprised to see just how much decay there now is in middle England. Empty shop properties are gnawing away at the heart of the commercial centres like death watch beetle in the timbers of society.Litter and graffitti were testimony to the lack of pride and discipline. Public space has become no man’s land. Concerned adults are too frigthened to complain if someone litters or abuses it.”
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I am surprised you haven’t mentioned Wokingham, your own constituency. The town centre is becoming a joke as shop after shop now stands empty. It is a sad and disgraceful state of affairs, for Wokingham is renowned as one of the wealthiest and nicest places to love in the country. I should know, as I pay enough for the privilege of doing so!

Even in the car and moving, you see a whole parades of shops empty now. My family run a small retail shop in a nearby village – rents/rates in Wokingham were ridiculously and prohibitively high. Only the identikit chain stores, coffee bars and charities remain, with maybe 1-2 small retailers hanging on by their fingernails.

There has long been talk of a town centre regeneration, but it seems our council have managed to design the deal such that the developers hold the cards and the council can do nothing about delays but fob off citizens when we protest. This is before the low level nuisances of graffiti and litter – butthese are cmparitively easy to rectify.

Look to your own back yard John, before worrying about the other towns. I’d be happy to take a walk through town with you. Focus on making Wokingham the place it should be first.

ATB
Liz

Reply: Would that I could. I have often held meetings with the Council and the developer to try to get them to reach an agreement and do something. The Council have decided to seek a new developer, and I am impatiently awaiting progress from them in their quest.An MP has no budget and no planning powers to sort these things out. I would love to be able to.

Many town centres do.

I’ve been active myself in bringing issues to the fore about action that needs to be taken at Town, District and County levels (and still am.)

The only reason I commented was that John Redwood was saying quite a lot of things and your response that “Wisbech was exactly like that at 9PM” was a little more extreme than just saying the town center had some issues. If I misunderstood your comment, then I’m sorry. But I felt a little protective of Wisbech, which is a place I’ve come to love.

My bete noir is the baseball cap or perhaps the tatoo that is so rebellious (in a conformist sort of way)

The major problem is the leases and landlords (business rates, though onerous, are a loose function of rent). I still feel many people here have let the government off the hook too easily.

How did the landlords have so much money to spend on chasing retail property prices higher and higher and then expecting to push up rental income to pay for it?

The answer is the money wasn’t the landlord’s it was borrowed and whose fault was it the economy was awash with money to borrow at unsustainably low rates?

The person who made the BoE independent.

Napoleon queried the country’s readiness for war by dismissing us as a ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’. Well thanks to this government we won’t even be that anymore.

Wisbech does indeed have empty shops, but no more so than other suffering market towns right now.

But we don’t have the “rip off parking” (most parking is free still, with a little at fairly low prices.)

We don’t have too many ‘ugly building given recent planning permission’. Most of our buildings are old, but historic.

We do have a ‘rough element’ around at night, but again, no more so than many towns of this type. Furthermore, I’m often out at night and haven’t encountered any significant problem in the town center.

I’m sure we have cameras, but they’re (by all accounts) seldom turned on and not really ‘pervasive’ (you can’t see them everywhere.)

We do have a problem (as I said above) with there being too many betting and charity shops and not much else, but that is a different problem to the one being described here.

Like many towns, we have problems. But I don’t feel Wisbech is any worse (and in some cases is much better) than many towns which have suffered under Labour’s reign.

Wisbech is, in some respects, a rough place. This is because it has some areas of deprivation which need to be addressed. But it suffers from a reputation which, I feel, is not fully deserved.

I’ve got to say, Charity Shops are an absolute curse. Maybe they do good work (‘maybe’ being the operative word with the big charity organisations) but they have become almost the only businesses that can afford to open shop in the center of some towns. There is something very wrong about that.

Generally I’m a free-trade sorta guy happy to let the most successful businesses prevail. But *absolute* free trade is the path to madness for exactly this sort of reason. You might end up with the perfect balance for production, but you don’t end up with the perfect balance for life.

Never once have I got all 3 miles to work, before my bag is completely full, and this is along lanes few cars travel on. I’m fearful that my good-citizenship in picking other-peoples detritus up, will probably be breaking some new council rubbish law or something.

I know the police are terribly busy behind their cctv screens putting fines in the post to one and all, but what about the general quality of life that used to amaze visitors the the UK 100 years ago?

The tourist industry used to be a huge earner for the UK not long ago, but who’s going to visit when Britain’s green and pleasant land is so rubbish-strewn and our cities are so full of drunken idiots at night?

On an unrelated note, you should never, ever keep bolt cutters in your car.

At all.

As an internet retailer myself, I do think that it is more than just the internet that is the problem. In my earlier post I stated that the price of rent and rates is a big problem – I simply could not make a living selling what I sell if I had a shop, because the margins on my products (which I sell at RRP by the way) are small. So if rents were lower, more retailers would be able to afford to have a shop and still make a living.

I can’t afford to do free delivery, or other freebies and I do think there is a problem with discounters (the big boys) in some areas but in my experience people come to me for the level of service which the big companies simply do not give and this is what small businesses often provide, not the chains. I could write an essay on the internet vs the high street, but don’t want to monopolise this blog!

Very good point – you are entirely correct. I suppose I had in the back of my mind one property mogul I know of, who is not an institution but more of a one-man company who owns a large portion of a town centre. He has, by manipulating a town council planning department and raising rents, succeeded in slowly killing a town centre I know of, driving out all the smaller businesses.

He “redeveloped” something which many people felt did not need redeveloping, it was not successful so he has redeveloped it again! He must owe millions to the banks. Like another similar, greedy operator I know of, chasing after the money paid by chains for flash units has resulted in a wasteland for shoppers and economic desolation for local communities.

I’m sure many small towns have this kind of property owner – the big institutions tend to focus on the larger towns and cities, with their shopping centres. Sorry I wasn’t clearer in the expression of my thoughts!

If you are a box shifter of standard commercial branded goods, who runs a shop in the high street, there is no way you can compete with a cheaper out of Town warehouse, where the only labour is packaging for transportation of goods.

Whilst the internet is percieved as all good, the big disadvantage is that in time you will not be able to touch and feel goods before you buy (exception to a degree clothes).
Many shops are now feeling the effect of just being used as an advice centre for the description, demonstrating and viewing of goods, before people buy on line because it is cheaper.
Who is to blame?
Firstly the shopper who uses the experience of the shop owner and then buys elsewhere.
Secondly the suppliers who very often allow bigger discounts to the on line warehouse, than to the shop who promotes their goods.
We will all eventually wake up to find no shops, no advice, no touch, demonstration or advice before you buy.
In this respect we get what we deserve, if price is always regarded as the King.
John on your other points:
Yes not enough Police on the streets, not enough sensible sentencing, not enough jails, poor Planning approval by people (Councillors) who very often cannot even read a drawing correctly.

Long term finance is provided by many institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies who either purchase the finished property or give long term finance to the property companies.

This long term finance is often set on a fixed rate/fixed uplifts which the “greedy” landlord as you have put it has to match through his rental stream.

With huge restrictions on development land caused rightly or wrongly by the planning system land prices are high.

With all those pensions to be paid when people retire investment streams need to be certain and very profitable.

The “greedy” landlord is a victim of the pensioner and the planning dept.