Town centres first?

You wait ages for government help for the high street and a string of measures come along all at once.

George Osborne kicked off this particular party last week, unveiling a cap on business rates rises of 2% in his autumn statement. This was accompanied by rate relief for smaller premises and measures to encourage reoccupation of vacant properties. All helpful as far as it goes, yet by booting a review of the rates system down the road to 2017, Osborne denied high-street retailers what they had been crying out for most.

On Friday, it was the turn of Eric Pickles to announce a “billion-pound package of support” for the UK’s high streets – though in effect, this billion included the money the government now stands not to make by capping rates rises at 2%, instead of pushing them up by 3.2%, as the RPI would have mandated.

Look closely and you’ll see Pickles’ package focuses on yet more consultations – for example, on whether we should allow change of use of retail premises to restaurants and leisure spaces (including swimming pools and cinemas – those notably cheap and profitable facilities that would no doubt spring up on every high street if only we liberalised planning laws – oh no, wait…).

Pickles’ big bugbear seems to be punitive parking polices; he suggests allowing more “grace periods” for people to dash in and grab their shopping. “Sensible changes to over-zealous parking rules will help make high streets more attractive to shoppers,” he added. No doubt they would; yet I can already picture the tailbacks and the honking of horns as vans and buses sit idling on your typical high street because they can’t get round an inconveniently parked car, left there by someone nipping in to WH Smith.

By all means abolish or reduce car parking charges to encourage people to get down to their town centres – but the fact remains we need to increase capacity, and that means building more car parks or putting in more parking spaces. One-nil to Amazon on that front, I’d say.

Finally, this weekend saw the launch of Small Business Saturday in the UK – like Black Friday and Cyber Monday before it, a US import, but with the slightly more nuanced aim of supporting local businesses.

The government lent its support to the day: even David Cameron tweeted a picture of himself shopping at his local butchers (only to be outed visiting the decidedly non-small business Waterstones later on).

Meanwhile, BIS announced £100m in “broadband vouchers” for 22 cities across the UK to “help more small firms boost their business by accessing faster and better broadband connectivity”. Yes, that’s right – government funds are now being doled out in voucher format, like the bit of paper you get at the till in Sainsbury’s. “Small businesses are the lifeblood of the British economy and responsible for nearly half the job creation in the UK,” said enterprise and skills minister Matthew Hancock.

Small Business Saturday is a noble enough idea – but doesn’t Independents’ Day do a similar thing? And while the government says all the right things about helping small businesses and the high street, it seems to give with one hand and take away with another. (Lest we forget, this is the government that pushed VAT up to 20%.)

As The Grocer reported this week, 76% of new retail floor space granted since March 2012 has been located outside town centres – this despite efforts to enshrine a ‘town-centre first’ principle in planning policy.

We know there are serious problems on the high street, and the government cannot solve all of them. But fiddling round the edges isn’t much help, either.