One of the things that all visitors to London notice is the contrast between Oxford Street and Regent Street. Oxford Street is riddled with tacky little shops selling vapes, tat and ‘American candy’. It has the usual plasticky mess of signage and the architecture is noisy and chaotic. By contrast, Regent Street has an unbroken sequence of prestige brands, tasteful and subdued shop signage, and coherent, stately architecture.
The government is giving councils powers to block new vape shops, betting shops and 24-hour slot machine shops – three classic blights on high streets
There is one simple reason for this: the whole of Regent Street is owned by one organisation, the Crown Estate. The Crown Estate will never let floorspace to businesses that would undermine the tone of the street, even if a business is willing to pay more for the floorspace. This is not altruism, but enlightened self-interest: the Crown Estate knows that it can attract more and better shoppers by maintaining the profile of Regent Street as a whole. By contrast Oxford Street has fragmented ownership, and its many owners have pitched the street into a race to the bottom.
This pattern is repeated across the country. One of the main reasons that out-of-town shopping centres tend to be so much more successful than high streets is that they have unified management. Specialised companies work carefully to make them convenient and secure places, albeit bland ones. High streets struggle partly because there is generally no one landowner to coordinate them in the same way.
This is why local governments have an important role in managing high streets, solving the collective action problems that unified ownership solves for out-of-town centres. And it is why we should broadly welcome the new powers that the government has announced today. The government is giving councils powers to block new vape shops, betting shops and 24-hour slot machine shops – three classic blights on high streets. It is giving the police more powers to pursue money laundering fronts. And it is apparently giving local authorities a firm steer to restrict tacky and invasive signage. All this will help local authorities to protect high streets from decay.
Will councils always wield these powers wisely? Obviously not. Councils often behave in crotchety and inflexible ways, and they can easily be captured by local special interests. For example, Islington Green features a permanently shuttered parade of shops. This is the result of the Council forcing a developer to put a financially unviable theatre behind them, way back in 2002. The ghostly theatre has never opened, and tens of millions of pounds of prime real estate has been completely wasted ever since. Still, the powers announced today have limited scope for misuse. Some check on the vape shop epidemic is probably better than nothing.
Many readers may find all this slightly surreal. Surely neon signage and vape shops are pretty marginal issues? Surely small businesses face much more important problems, some of them of this government’s making? They would be right. High streets face heaps of problems that are untouched by today’s announcements.
One obvious priority is tackling endemic shoplifting, a crime that seems to have soared in recent years due to ineffectual policing. My personal awakening to this problem occurred in a Boots in North London, when I noticed that the three young women who staffed the shop were anxiously locking the doors behind every customer who entered. They told me that two local shoplifters were hovering outside, waiting for a moment to walk in and pillage the shop. I looked across the road and, sure enough, two men were standing on the other side of the road, watching the shop wolfishly and waiting for their moment. ‘Why don’t you call the police?’ I asked. They looked pityingly at me, as though I had shown the naivety of a child. Many readers will have had such experiences: many shopkeepers have them every day.
The police are actually perfectly capable of solving this problem. Over the last year the Met has been remarkably successful in cutting street crime, having belatedly recognised the scale of the problem. With firm support and leadership from above, they could do the same on shoplifting. Until they do, tinkering with signage regulations does have a slightly farcical quality.
Still, we should not make the perfect the enemy of the slightly better. People care a lot about their high streets: Andy Burnham is showing once again a striking talent for acting on questions that are close to people’s hearts. Vape shops and neon signage may not be a very important problem, but they are a problem. Addressing it is at least a start.
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