Reality is hard enough without press misrepresentation

Life on the high street is hard and getting harder, but headlines declaring the high street dead are worse than just wrong, they are dangerous, says bira.

Suzanne Moore in the Guardian peppered her usual spicy article with important factual errors. "Many of our high streets have a third of their shops boarded up": wrong: half a dozen out of 1000 town centres have a third of their shops permanently shuttered. Two thirds of towns have a lower vacancy rate than the 14.3% national figure. More than one in ten towns have less than one in twenty outlets vacant. 

"The big chains have killed off the small shops" wrong: two out of three of all the shops in the UK are independents and the balance is moving in their favour. In the last two years independents have opened 5000 and 6500 shops respectively and are on course to open 7500 this year. They give our towns immense resilience.

The Daily Mail took a typically broad comment from Mary Portas about a handful of town centres identified in the latest Local Data Company report and turned it into a completely misleading headline that the High Street is Dead. She was commenting about the half dozen town centres with more than a third of shops shut. 

The real issue is not shops, it's our towns. We might be able to replace shops with superstores and websites but our towns, with the many social and economic functions they perform cannot be replaced by e-commerce and out of town centres. In practice the commercial health of towns depends on its shops and, increasingly, it depends on its independent shops as multiples flee to out of town parks.

So, the long term future of our towns depends on the proposed planning regime. That has the potential to let a thousand town centres bloom or to unleash a plague of out-of-town malls everywhere between the town and the green belt - it all depends on how we all engage with the new rules now, as they are formed.

bira depoty CEO Michael Weedon commented: "We have seen villages stripped of their shops, pubs and post offices - it is our duty to make sure we don't let that happen to our towns as well. The current planning policy consultation is our last opportunity to do so. Everyone should get involved, now."

(Source of statistics: Local Data Company)

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• Complex issues

  Posted by: John Orchard (John Orchard)

  There is a danger about this piece too. The problem with reacting against the so-called 'doomsayers' ,who are very often wrong and prone to overstatement, is that to ply a series of statistics to demonstrate how good the world really is, is itelf disingenuous. There is so much information put out there that the people who make policy decisions might be forgiven for making the wrong call when that data comes in contradictory packages. I am working with a group of retailers in a Lincolnshire town who are resisting a new out of town development. The local authority is having to deal with the developers claims and those of the retailers and having to make a judgement about whether to allow a 'big new investment' or rather to support the existing retailers in the town centre. These councillors are not retailers, they are not town planners and they are often not even representing the ward in which the town centre is based - yet they will have to decide. I think that it is well beyond time that a frsh impetus was made to create a database of facts derived from empirical research that takes into consideration the issues that are important to independent retailers. We need hard facts, we need strenght in our arguments and that can only be achieved by presenting solid research with balanced and considered conclusions.

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