Cameron’s false tears over decline of town-centre shopping

I SEE that David Cameron is roping in TV personality Mary Portas to advise him how to save declining town centres from becoming “clone towns” (Yorkshire Post, May 17).

This is the kind of hypocrisy one can expect from a man whose background is in PR. His tears are not real: they are the tears of a crocodile who is only really interested in big business.

While engaging a media specialist to provide advice and the right spin, his government has done everything possible to ruin traditional town centres, by encouraging the stranglehold the four big superstore chains have on the economy.

One hopes that his adviser will identify this as the main cause for town centre decline, but this is unlikely because one doesn’t need to be a genius or a highly paid media specialist to work this out. So all we can expect for the superstores is a dollop of official whitewash.

The truth is that in March 2009 the former Labour government relaxed planning controls so as to enable planning authorities to grant planning permission for all but the largest superstores without any kind of central government scrutiny through the “call in” procedure.

This procedure was a check on the powers of local planning authorities and used to safeguard central government policies such as keeping existing town centres viable.

Mr Cameron’s government has gone one step further than this: they have disbanded the regional planning offices, and with them most central government controls over planning, and at the same time cut the planning inspectorate by one third.

The idea is to let “the local community” make their own decisions. Unfortunately this spin does not really mean the local community as we know it, but the area presided over by the local planning authority – areas which can be as big as Birmingham, Liverpool or Manchester.

At the same time, Mr Cameron’s Government is encouraging councils to get money by selling their assets to the highest bidder, and of course, in the present financial climate the highest return can be obtained by selling land to a superstore.

This is what is happening in Ryedale. This is why in July last year there was a march and a public demonstration against the sale of a Malton car park to a superstore.

The trouble with national politicians is that nobody can believe them any more. Mr Cameron is no more interested in saving town centres than he is in saving the NHS.

From: John Gordon, Whitcliffe Lane, Ripon.

THE one business that seems to have benefited from the recession is hairdressing. In our town, the solitary bookshop is surrounded by salons to the left and salons to the right. The high class and more expensive establishments are simply called “salon” but the trendier ones go for snappier names such as A Cut Above or Cutting Edge. In all of them, the busiest days are Friday or Saturday when the women are having a makeover for their social life.

The amount of money spent is quite disproportionate, men never seem to approach the height of female fashion, which is perhaps just as well as otherwise there would be no money to buy the drinks when the couples go out on the town. To my mind, all this is a good sign and shows that however hard the Chancellor of the Exchequer tries, he will never spread gloom and doom throughout the country.