The pandemic has shown us how our town centres can be saved, now we just need the political will to do it

Thousands more retail jobs will go but, with co-ordinated efforts and some bold ideas, a positive new vision of the high street is possible, writes Ben Chapman

In announcing thousands of job cuts on Tuesday, M&S joined other famous names like John Lewis, Selfridges, Debenhams and WH Smith (iStock)

“Don’t ask the price. It’s a penny,” Michael Marks used to say when the department store chain that now bears his name was merely a market stall in Leeds.

135 years later and Marks & Spencer has a far more up-market reputation and £10bn in turnover, but is not immune from the pain enveloping Britain’s retailers.

In announcing thousands of job cuts on Tuesday, M&S joined other famous names like John Lewis, Selfridges, Debenhams and WH Smith. The disruption will undoubtedly get worse in the latter part of this year.

As M&S boss Steve Rowe put it, customers might “never shop the same way again” after the coronavirus crisis. The lifeblood of most town centres up and down the UK is under threat, and with it millions of jobs in shops, pubs restaurants.

Many retailers, M&S included, are belatedly taking bolder steps to adapt. They arguably should have been more radical in their approach earlier.

After all, Covid has merely accelerated trends that have been gathering pace for a couple of decades. The internet has been around for a while now.

Selfridges claimed this week it would “reinvent retail” by becoming a truly sustainable business and launching a range of in-store repair, recycle and reuse initiatives.

John Lewis too is planning to lease furniture as part of a bid to to appeal to “the next generation of customers” who are used to sharing things like bikes and cars rather than owning them. The department store chain is also looking to convert some of its unused stores into affordable housing.

Most retailers have been seeking ways to add to the shopping experience and make it worth the trip, providing things like personal shoppers, kids’ play areas, cafes. M&S has been attempting to reinvent itself for about 20 years.

It is undeniable that we are shopping more online and this requires fewer jobs but no retailer can turn back the tide. Many of the broader problems retailers and, by extension our town centres, face are not of their own making.

A high street only works as a collective unit, offering enough options and experiences to draw people in.

The ideas are there to reverse the decline and redefine what our town centres are about, but the will to implement them seems weak. Numerous government-commissioned reviews and reports over the years have been released to fanfare then followed up with no action.

While the pandemic may have familiarised more people with the convenience of online shopping, it has also demonstrated to us more than ever the incalculable value of our public, communal spaces.

Few of us can really want to live in a world where those spaces are left empty and derelict, or just replaced by more housing, leaving hollowed out towns with no centre, just a heartless suburban sprawl.

A wider vision is needed, alongside the will to actually implement it.

Up until now, government policy in this area has been disastrous, exacerbating the decline of town centres rather than reversing it.

Our tax system gives huge, unearned advantages to multinational technology companies who – in most cases, legally – shift their profits into tax havens.

Paying, say, 7 per cent tax on profits, compared to the UK rate of 19 per cent is a massive boost for online retailers, further tilting an already uneven playing field.

There has been some movement to redress the balance with a 2 per cent digital services tax which came into force in April but the tech giants still have a considerable edge.

In contrast to the generous treatment Amazon and others receive, traditional retailers are lumbered with the laughably out of date business rates regime. It is overly complicated and hits traditional retailers much harder than online rivals.

While Amazon’s services are undeniably popular and efficient, it is clear that the company attracts many people because it is cheaper than offline options.

How big would that price advantage be if Amazon and other e-commerce companies were forced to compete on genuinely fair terms?

If we dawdle any longer on answering these questions, many of those competitors may have gone out of business.

Public transport is another important issue. It has been destroyed in many parts of the country over several decades.

In 1984, when the government of the day looked at selling off the bus network, it said:

“Without the dead hand of restrictive regulation fares could be reduced now on many bus routes and the operator would still make a profit. New and better services would be provided. More people would travel.

“...If the customer has the final say, bus operators will look keenly to see where and when people want to travel. If one operator fails to provide a service that is wanted, another will.”

Well, the results are in. This has not happened. A House of Commons committee concluded last year that real competition exists almost nowhere in the UK’s public transport network.

Instead, underfunding and privatisation has seen more than 3,000 bus routes reduced, altered or withdrawn in England since 2010/11 alone, leaving people in most parts of the country with access to expensive, infrequent or non-existent bus services into town centres. The number of passenger kilometres fell by 38 per cent from 2002 to 2017. Many people and communities and who rely on buses have become isolated, the MPs concluded.

When the pandemic hit and revenues went through the floor, the mostly foreign-owned bus and train companies required the state’s dead hand to resurrect itself and give them a £1bn bailout.

Investment in new public transport infrastructure for our towns and cities has been patchy at best. While London will (eventually) get the shiny new £18.2bn Crossrail, plans to bring back trams to Leeds’ streets have been on the backburner since 1991 thanks to flip-flopping by a succession of governments. Now the city is pencilling in a date of 2033 to get the trams rolling once again.

Meanwhile, options to cycle into and around most UK town centres are limited and many high streets remain full of cars leaving an artery of air pollution flanked by a fringe of pound shops, bookmakers and boarded up units. In short, not particularly pleasant places to go.

The make-up of our high streets is not the inevitable result of market forces, raging out of our control, like the weather. It is to a large extent a reflection of public policies.

Our policies on taxation, transport and council funding have created the urban landscape we now have. The pandemic has offered glimpses of how it can be reimagined. Streets in many areas have been closed to traffic and filled with cafe tables or spaces to play.

London is among dozens of cities that have rapidly rolled out new cycle routes that aren’t just an 18-inch strip of paint, making many areas more accessible and healthier. The government recently announced a £2bn “cycling and walking revolution”. Such changes can endure and be improved upon as we return to normality.

If millions of people are going to forego the joys of commuting into city centres for work and stay in the suburbs, perhaps some of those empty shops could be converted into workspaces (that don’t charge extortionate rates). Doing so could improve footfall and help to revive the fortunes of towns and suburbs hit hardest in the era of e-commerce. Others could be occupied by social enterprises who commit to help regenerate the area.

None of this needs to be utopian or unrealistic.

And what is the alternative? Following the current trend towards online shopping to its logical conclusion without reviving our town centres takes you somewhere pretty bleak: An atomised world where we sit in our homes pressing a button on an app each time we want to consume something and it’s delivered to our door by a person on a moped who will one day - when Jeff Bezos deems that the time is right – be replaced by a robot.