Business is booming on the most expensive street in Europe. In one weekend alone, sales of vintage Ferraris, Aston Martins and other motors at Bonhams on London’s Bond Street put almost £13million through the tills. Sales of luxury goods are roaring here and, if you browse the flagship stores, a Louis Vuitton Kusama Pumpkin Minaudiere Jewel bag will set you back £80,000 and a Chanel ‘diamond forever handbag a cool £175,000.
But the dizzying success of Bond Street, where David Cameron’s wife works for an upmarket leather goods firm, is a far cry from the reality on high streets in the rest of the country. There, a different story emerges. One of tens of thousands of boarded up shops, pound stores, payday lenders and pawnbrokers. Nothing more perfectly illustrates the weak economic recovery that’s overseen the growth of breadline Britain than the state of our country’s high streets.
Over the last few years I’ve toured Britain’s high streets and seen the Government’s failures writ large. In far too many towns the rot has set in and things are getting worse. Even in David Cameron’s seat of Witney I’ve met with struggling small business owners furious at the Government’s failure to support them. As technological advances and changing consumer behaviour aggressively disrupted the old high street model, making plenty of businesses no longer viable, the Government needed to offer the support and policies to help develop a 21st century high street. They’ve failed to do this – and Tory policies are making things worse.
At a time when traders were already having a tough time, the Government added to their woes by postponing a business rates revaluation, which would have undoubtedly seen taxes come down in many parts of the country to adjust to falling property prices. This cynical move was done simply to protect London and retailers on Bond Street alone have been able to save £66million on their business rates as a result.
Elsewhere, though, shops have been taxed out of business and we’ve now got a situation where a chip shop in Rochdale is forced to pay more than three times its rent in business rates. While London has saved £1.5billion in business rates, businesses in the North West, for example, are paying £682million more than had the revaluation not been postponed.
Other hopeless policies include laughable attempts to tax pasties, which was thrown out after protests by bakers, and a feeble attempt to roll out fast broadband across the UK. We know technology is transforming the way we shop and Britain needs to start preparing for the future, ensuring local authorities wire all high streets with no black spots. Yet, Tory ministers seem stuck in the 1980s and we still lag behind Korea and Finland in broadband speed. Even Latvia and Romania have better Internet connection speed than the UK.
It’s failures like these that are the real story of this Government. Over the last five years the Tories have not only introduced the biggest increase in business rates in 20 years to push many small businesses into liquidation, they’ve failed to sufficiently boost broadband infrastructure to ensure that high streets can move with the times and they’ve failed miserably to provide any leadership and get all local authorities developing a long-term sustainable plan to save their high street.
Instead we’ve had the ridiculous spectacle of the Government’s high street tsar, Mary Portas, making reality TV out of struggling towns and spending tax payers money on Peppa Pig costumes, gorilla statues and entertainers dressed as cleaning ladies to desperately try and improve high streets.
Add to which the poor handling of the economy by George Osborne, which has seen a South East dominated recovery with many parts of the country still coming out of recession, and there’s a perfect storm playing out on the high street.
We’re seeing a growing low wage economy and an explosion of zero hours contracts springing up in town centres everywhere. Things are so bad that in some parts of the country there are pound shop wars. In Eccles, two pound shops went head to head rebranding as the 89p superstore and the 85p shop.
Surely we deserve better than this.
‘All politics is local’ is a phrase we used to hear a lot. And politicians would do well to remember this. Because every town centre deserves its own special high street. One with thriving businesses supporting a local economy, modern libraries as technology hubs and a good range of housing, education, culture and other community facilities to make them living, vibrant spaces once more.
The Tories like to claim they’ve saved the economy but the sight of boarded up shops everywhere shows this to be nonsense. The high street is a mirror of the real economy and it doesn’t lie. George and Dave might have helped the purveyors of luxury goods on Bond Street hit the jackpot this Parliament, but thousands of other places have had to put up with state sponsored deterioration.
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