Save high streets with people power

If the Queen of Shops can’t fix our dying high streets, who can?

Ten of the 12 “Portas Pilot” towns that won cash and access to TV retail guru Mary Portas (below) last year have seen a fall in shop numbers.

Her bright ideas included market stalls, cheap parking, “town teams” and a National Market Day. But BBC research shows shopping in the “lucky 10” English towns has bombed. So what went wrong?

Were the ideas bad, the shops tatty and the town centres too far gone? Or have austerity and the internet combined to sink perfectly good high streets?

Well, two thirds of fruit and vegetable shops and one third of butchers have closed in Scotland since 1998 and the Competition Commission estimates £7 of every £10 spent on groceries now goes into a supermarket till.

A big shopping shift is going on. Surveys show town centre spending everywhere is down by 10% in the last five years while out of town and internet shopping has doubled. At that rate there’ll be no high street left by the time our children draw their pensions.

Doubtless we all feel sad that the busy, varied high streets of our youth are now lined with charity shops, sun-tan parlours, betting emporiums and corner stores. But sadness (and guilt) will not coax us away from the two-for-one offers, greater choice, longer opening hours and free parking that come with supermarkets, even though half the money spent in local shops keeps circulating within towns and villages while the bulk of supermarket income leaves to pay distant shareholders and national or multi-national suppliers.

Scotland has more supermarket floor space per head of population than anywhere in Britain and probably Europe. According to retail market experts CACI, Dundee tops the over-provision league table and nine of the 10 most “over-provided” postcodes in the UK are Scottish. Rates bills are 10 times cheaper out of town and though small high street businesses get rates relief in Scotland, some big internet firms pay next to nothing. We need a level playing field on taxation fast.

But it’s not just an economic argument. The best town centres are memorable, distinctive, different and eye-catching places. Supermarkets are samey and featureless places where standardisation seems to be the pinnacle of human achievement.

The more we spend time indoors on computers, the more we need real, vibrant places to mingle and meet. So why not follow the successful regeneration efforts of Book Town Wigtown or Craft Town West Kilbride? In the Ayrshire toon, arts folk took over a dozen empty shops and locals are now revamping quarries and old kirks. Why not have old folks homes on the high street? Watching the hubbub of daily life stops older people feeling isolated.

The snag is that towns aren’t run by townspeople. “Local” councils are far bigger and more remote. Sure, Chambers of Commerce, Development Trusts, community councils and Transition Towns are all trying to breathe new life into old streets, but they don’t have statutory clout. Councils are offloading buildings but they often remain owners, so community groups can’t finance a new start.

We all know there are as many good ideas in Scotland as there are empty shop fronts and bored kids. Why can’t we connect them all up? Local community control over local regeneration is the answer.

And we need Alex Salmond not Mary Portas on the case to achieve that!