My pie in the sky dream would be for councils to buy high street shops, land and all, and rent them back with rent caps to small business owners. No more sky high business rates to worry about. Encourage small and medium size businesses to set up and grow their business up to a certain amount of turnover a year. Maybe that might reverse the trend in businesses abandoning the high street because there’s no customers and customers abandoning the high street because the prices are sky high?
But who am I fooling? I live in Bristol and what we need is the council to fund building of a mega arena not even inside Bristol 🤷.
Councils are going bankrupt because they can’t even run their own business. Letting them be landlords also is a recipe for disaster.
Not just the high street but also high density housing around as its the most valuable land in the city.
But I think it should all be done at market rate. Set a target of say 95% occupation and set the rate at that. If it’s 0 or if it’s 1,000,000 then so be it. The money can get returned to the town. Maybe have some alterations to this. Like 5 year contracts and if you renew you get a discount.
Land value tax is the closest we have to this and thankfully Wales is bringing it in. Its a very good system.
Remember it’s not the landlords, it’s the lack of parking
Eh no. There are many goods everyone prefers not to shop online, but in-person. The fall of the high street doesn’t have one singular reason. Everything from the rise in driving removing foot traffic, to high rents, to 15 years of austerity.
There are many goods everyone prefers not to shop online, but in-person
I’m struggling to think of many example - hence my local high street beeing mainly cafes, nail-bars, barbers and cornershops selling every day essentials
Reminds me of this series “Turn Back Time” in which they took shops from the high street throughout the ages to show how they’ve disappeared, and that was filmed 10 years ago.
I’d be interested to see this broken down on whether the high street has been pedestrianised or not. There’s high streets that are a busy road with shops, which I would avoid, and those that have been pedestrianised and are actually places where you can spend some time.
We need onerous vacancy taxes. Currently by my understanding, vacant property actually gets tax breaks.
