How community-based businesses could save our high streets - Dr Julian Dobson

The crisis on the high street is not a new phenomenon. In my research, I've found nostalgic references to loss and change in British retailing as far back as 1937, when the painter Eric Ravilious was commissioned to produce lithographs of high street shops for Country Life magazine. In the 1980s similar views were expressed about the rise of out-of-town shopping centres like Sheffield's Meadowhall.

But my latest research has also shown that there are alternatives to an endless saga of shop closures and nostalgia for a bygone age. In recent work with the lottery-funded organisation, Power to Change, we showed how community-based businesses can help to breathe new life into towns and cities.

First, though, it's important to acknowledge that high streets are not going to return to anyone's idea of long-lost glory.

There have been long-term structural shifts. Online shopping has changed the way we consume for good. In November 2022 nearly one third of retail sales were online, according to the Office for National Statistics. Services such as banking are disappearing: last month the Money Saving Expert website reported that another 193 bank branches will go in 2023.

Other factors have helped to bust any post-Covid boom. Labour shortages are evident across the country, with notices in pubs, shops and restaurants advertising vacancies. According to UK Hospitality, vacancies in the hospitality industry are now well above pre-pandemic levels, with more than 150,000 jobs unfilled. Retailers face a triple whammy of rising costs (especially energy), staff shortages, and squeezed customers who are cutting out non-essential spending.

One of the most visible changes is the disappearance of department stores. This segment of the market is in freefall: in 2021 the Retail Gazette reported that 388 department stores had shut in the UK in the previous five years, accounting for 83 per cent of department store floorspace.

Sheffield's John Lewis is a case in point: the former Cole Brothers store, for all its history, was judged unviable and remains shuttered while different interest groups debate how to reuse the site.

Despite the gloom, there are ways in which high streets can again become the physical, economic and social hubs of their communities. It will take time. But community-based businesses are showing how locally-based and locally-accountable organisations can create lasting value where commercial investors have failed.

There are already some well-established examples, such as the community-owned Hebden Bridge Town Hall which now offers business and events spaces in what was an unused council building.

Property owners, local authorities and funders have often been reluctant to take local ideas seriously or to back them with the right resources at the right time.

Our research found that long-term, sustainable change is most likely to happen where community businesses can cluster together, creating a group of spaces and activities that become more than the sum of the parts. But this requires long-term commitment and can never be a quick fix. It has taken Hastings Commons 15 years to build up its cluster of activities, more often than not working under the radar and against the odds.

Four kinds of support are vital. These are - help in getting access to property at a fair price; financial support for community businesses, including at-risk funding for start-ups; supportive governance and regulation to give communities more of a say in their high streets and help for community organisations in building skills (such as property management) and networks.

At a national level, proposals such as the £350m High Street Buyout Fund mooted by Power to Change could help to jump-start such a process and counter the boom-and-bust cycle that dominates current approaches to retailing.

But there's also room for more locally-based proposals such as the People's Property Portfolio in Bradford, a community benefit society backed by Assembly Bradford, The Brick Box arts company, New Economics Foundation and others.

The People's Property Portfolio is working on ways to enable community-based organisations to take ownership of land and buildings in the city. Its research found that 23 companies own five or more properties in the BD1 postcode, and of these six are based offshore and another 18 are outside the city of Bradford, with no obvious local connection.

Dr Julian Dobson is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University.