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High Street Recovery Needs Input from People Who Have Been on the Inside

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I’ve been involved in retail for as long as I can remember. From my first proper job as a Saturday boy in a menswear store in Lewisham through my days as a market trader in Camden Lock and Greenwich to being co-founder of a national high street chain that started with a small store in Oxford selling silver jewellery. and grew into a national chain trading in 6 of country’s major retail locations, including London’s prestigious Covent Garden.

In that time I saw almost as many ups as I did downs. I’ve half jokingly said that I spent 20 years building the business and then another 10 trying extricating it from the failing high street. Like so many other retailers who entered the high street during the boom years in the early 1990s, I fell foul of the simultaneous boom in commercial property development. So many new malls were opened in the 90s and early 2000s it was difficult to keep up and I opened stores in some of the most iconic examples such as the New Bullring in Birmingham and Bluewater in Kent.

The other boom at the time was in business rates, which along with rents skyrocketed through that period as institutional landlords, mostly backed by large pension funds, cashed in on the retail bubble ploughing millions into new shiny malls based on the emerging US model. It was great while it lasted and we all became caught up in the heady days of seemingly limitless opportunities. But we soon discovered there were limits.

The Financial crash in 2008 gave us all a pretty sharp reality check and things soon started to become far less buoyant and rents that had been agreed on the back of rude profit margins started to look far less tenable as turnovers started to fall.

I’ve been fighting for a fairer deal for High Street retail for over 15 years

There soon followed a series of frantic rounds of renegotiation with landlords who themselves were facing the prospect of huge hole in their new developments as retailers started to fall over with alarming regularity. In many cases we were able to come to mutual agreements to keep us trading at the shopping malls looking full, but the one thing that couldn’t be re-negotiated were business rates. Set as they were, by the central valuation office, and administered by local authorities, they were completely devoid of any chance of concession unless you had an understanding council. In my experience their understanding was rather limited, and after 5 years as a local councillor myself I now understand more about why that was.

So we were all caught in a perfect storm that only a few managed to emerge from. My business was one of the luckier ones as I managed to negotiate deals that gave us breathing space. But I could see the writing on the wall and it was telling me to get out of the high street and decamp to the internet where so many of our competitors were lurking. Thereby hangs another very long story.

But suffice to say I have an intimate understanding of the plight of the high street, in fact much more intimate than I would prefer. For that reason one of my personal priorities as a fresh faced new MP would be to push for a new system of business rates or local high street taxation. Other things like rent controls and use classes would also be high on the agenda, but none of this will be an easy fix for an industry in the doldrums after so many years in decline. But I know from my own experience that smaller independents are both the lifeblood of local high streets whilst also being the most vulnerable.

In terms of the dreaded business rates, I think I could take elements from the land tax approach of the Green party and add in some aspect of a local purchase tax as seen in the USA. Such a tax would be far more progressive and have more respect for the ability of businesses to pay such an additional tax. That would give a far greater connection between the local community, local authorities and the retailers themselves. If all retailers did well then they would all reap the benefits.

Speaking to local councillors and retailers about business rates reform

I don’t really have the answer to full business rates reform, but I’ve been campaigning for a better system for over 10 years. I would advocate a situation where we involved existing high street retailers in the process of finding a solution. There have been past attempts at doing this, but very few, if any, involved small independent retailers. I think that was a mistake.

The Labour Party have boldly announced that they would scrap the current business rates system, but they haven’t said what they would replace it with. I’ve been here before many times, and both Labour and the Tories have frequently promised reform but never delivered on that. One of the biggest reason is that business rates are a virtually guaranteed income for government bringing in over £13bn a year. Even if the premises are empty, the landlord cops for the bill so it’s a win-win for Westminster. So any new system is likely to be just as iniquitous and damaging, especially to smaller operators.

I think there is a way of developing a system of local high street taxation that could benefit all sides of the equation, including the consumer. Just scrapping the business rates system with no plan for what would replace it is not a solution, yet its the current proposal from the part that is most likely to form the next government in a few weeks. If I was in Westminster I’d hope to be able to provide a far better insight into the problems on the high street and how to engage with the people who face those problems every day.

I’d like to see genuine consultation with high street stakeholders, including landlords and local councils, about the best way forwards. As a long term retailer, having moved from being a small business, through a larger expansion and back to being a ‘born again independent’, I’d like to be involved in that process. But I guess it remains to be seen what the outcome is on July 4th.

I’ve just published a video I made during a recent visit to Bicester with some thoughts on how we can work towards a better system of high street business taxation and help to repair our broken high streets and you can watch that by clicking here.

If you’re a retailer or just someone who enjoys browsing physical shops, I’d suggest you vote for someone like me who has the experience to make that a viable possibility again. Retail is at the heart of every village, town and city and needs political support to make it vibrant again. Many politicians claim to have the answer but few of them have been on the inside of the industry. I think that needs to change. I’d like to change it.

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Cherwell’s Reckless Investment in a Struggling Shopping Centre Leads to Cuts in Services and Increased Charges for all Cherwell Residents

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    Cherwell District Council announced it’s budget last week detailing £4.4m in cuts and extra charges that it will be imposing on the residents of Cherwell as well as an increase in council tax.

    During the budget debate I raised my concerns that around a third of these cuts and charges were as a result of losses incurred over the past two years in Banbury

    In a nutshell the centre is predicted to make a loss of around £1.6m in the 21/22 financial year after having made a similar loss in 20/21.  On a broader scale, taking into account some small gains in the first 2 years the council owned the development, it will have racked up losses in the region of £2.5m by the end of the next financial year if the current predictions are correct.  To close the gap left by that hole in the budget there have been additional service cuts with around a third of those in the forthcoming budget directly attributable to pressures from Castle Quay. 

    You may have seen some of this in the press this week in Oxford Mail and the Banbury Guardian

    I was also interviewed by BBC Radio Oxford, although my section was recorded and heavily edited, after which Cllr Tony Ilot ,the Lead Member for Financial Management & Governance on Cherwell District Council, was invited on the show live to respond.  If we’d been on at the same time I might have pointed out that as the councillor responsible for this development it would have been more encouraging had he bothered to do his homework before coming on.  At one point he seemed uncertain about how much the losses amounted to (he guessed at £1.3m and the interviewer had to correct him that it was £1.6m) and he also claimed that the £1.6m was a cumulative loss since the council took ownership.  It’s not, it’s just the predicted loss for the forthcoming year on top of a similar one for the last year. You’d think the Lead Member for Financial Management & Governance might have been a little more cognisant of the situation given the scale of problem, but this lack of concern over important details is a familiar theme with Cherwell’s Conservatives.

    Cllr Ilot also seemed quite laid back about the fact that the centre is now worth less than half what was paid for item having lost a whopping £30m in value.  They are also currently spending even more than the original purchase price for the shopping centre on the canal side extension which, as a retail analyst myself, I think they are going to struggle to make a return on.

    You can listen to the interview in full here 

    The council’s line on this has been that the losses at CQ have not directly resulted in an increase in the council tax. As that increase was already in the pipeline anyway that’s probably fair to say, but it also fair to say that if this white elephant wasn’t providing such a huge financial drag on the council’s resources, we may not have needed to increase the tax and we certainly wouldn’t have need many of the cuts in services.

    It will be interesting to see how much support we get for the high street in Kidlington and the Exeter Close project in the light of all this.  Certainly something we can point them to if they start penny-pinching on our project to support the eye-watering amounts of public money that’s being poured into one scheme in the far north of the district that we’re all footing the bill for.

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    Should Cherwell District Council be Risking Public Money Buying Shopping Centres?

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    As I said in the recent election debate on the BBC, in my opinion they shouldn’t.

    There are many reasons it’s a bad idea, both from a business perspective and as part of local spending priorities.

    I’ve worked in retail nearly all my life.  I built and ran a national chain of jewellery stores across the country and traded in several shopping centres, including some of the most prestigious in the country such as Bluewater in Kent and the new Bullring Centre in Birmingham.  I write a regular column for Retail week Magazine and comment regularly in the national press on retail issues as well as offering consultancy services.  One of my main focusses is independent retail and commercial property.  So I know a little bit about what I’m talking about.

    Cherwell District Council (CDC) leader Barry Wood claims that buying the Castle Quay Shopping Centre in Banbury is a good deal for the people of Cherwell.  This decision was also backed by the Labour group on the council and their leader Sean Woodcock has assured me there’s a good business case for doing it.  Unfortunately neither of them have been able to show it to me so far.

    Their belief is that buying a commercial property like a shopping centre is a good idea as property will always rise in value.  This may be the case for domestic property and some kinds of commercial premises, but not always with retail space.

    A Good Investment?

    The argument for buying the scheme seems to be that if they hadn’t, the centre would have shut down.  It has many long term empty units and is generally struggling to compete in an ever crowded marketplace.  The council’s decision a few years ago to allow a new shopping park to open on the outskirts of Banbury haven’t helped its plight.

    It’s extremely unlikely though that it would have closed down.  Much more likely that it would have been offloaded by its pension investment owners to another investment company with more experience of running a shopping centre than some local councillors.

    Moreover, if the argument is that the centre was about to collapse, that doesn’t exactly make it an attractive investment for public money does it?

    There have been some shopping centre failures in the past, but they are few and far between.  But when they do go, they tend to go completely.  That means an almost total loss for anyone unlucky enough to be the owner at the time.  There will be some residual value in the land, but that’s unlikely to reflect the full price paid for the whole development.

    There have been a growing number of retail failures in recent years with 650 collapses so far this year alone, and we’re not even half way through yet!  Some of them very high profile and heavily leveraged operations.  Others are busy negotiating partial closures and rent reductions with their landlords.  Others are moving more into the online arena and abandoning physical retail space almost altogether.

    None of this bodes well for an under-let, under-invested and down at heel shopping centre in a struggling town in North Oxfordshire.

    So essentially CDC are gambling with public money against the odds.  And it doesn’t end there.

    Other Costs

    According to Barry Wood the scheme is turning a profit at the moment, but as I’ve said previously, I’ve not seen evidence of that.  I have seen a large number of long term voids in the centre, and with the potential for these to increase in number I fear the profitability may be marginal or likely to decline.

    There will also be ongoing running costs for the centre and presumably additional investment to do whatever it is with the place that they feel will revitalise it.  Again details on that are sketchy, but I think there’s some talk about dividing the larger units into smaller ones to attract independent retailers.  Whilst I support that idea to some extent there are a lot of things to consider about that course of action.

    Firstly the cost of doing the work, which may include major re-modelling of the units due to, amongst other things, fire regulations.  I’ve seen at least one shopping centre management come unstuck with similar plans due to rules on access to fire exit routes.

    Helping Smaller Retailers?

    Secondly smaller independents usually don’t have a huge budget for shopfitting, so there will be additional cost in partially fitting out the units, including new shopfronts etc to attract smaller operators and to ensure that their stores fit in with a modern shopping centre scheme.

    Business Rates

    Thirdly there’s the loss of business rates on the empty units that are there now, and will most likely be there for a while.  Considering the current climate in retail there’s also a good chance that voids could increase.  At the moment the landlords will be paying rates on those premises even though they’re empty and a good deal of that money goes to CDC.  With the council now being the landlords, they’re going to be paying the rates to themselves, effectively wiping out that income.

    Devaluation of the Asset

    Finally there’s the issue of valuation.  Shopping developments are broadly valued on their rental potential.  This is why landlords will leave units empty rather than let them out at a reduced rent.  If the council’s plan is to lower the rent for smaller or other retailers, that will have a knock on effect on the value of those units and then on others when rent reviews come around.  Other tenants now paying a higher rent will also push for a reduction when their leases come up for renewal or rent reviews are due or maybe even before.

    The net effect of this would be to push down rents, not only in the centre but across the town, reducing loan to asset values across the board.  In broad terms I’d welcome that.  I’ve long argued that retail property values are hugely inflated.  But in terms of the Council’s investment exposure in Castle Quay it’s a potentially dangerous situation, not only leading to a potential devaluation of the asset, but also any loans secured on it being partially called in.

    There may be some balancing in terms of appreciation on the total asset value, but in the current climate and in a falling retail market, there a very good chance that the overall value of the scheme will fall relative to the amount the council has sunk into it, both as an initial investment and any further day to day expenditure.

    All of this appears to have passed Cherwell Councillors and the leaders of Labour and the Conservatives by.  They obviously have a very patchy understanding of how retail property works and the implications and pitfalls they are letting us all as council tax payers in for.

    Moreover there’s the question of if so much money should be focussed in the north of the district while ignoring other areas.  Mr Wood commented in the Radio debate on Wednesday that he recognised that there were empty units in Pioneer Square in Bicester and that it was difficult to get them filled.  Yet this doesn’t seem to have concerned him over the purchase of Castle Quay.  Indeed, having set the precedent in Banbury I asked him during the debate if the council intended to buy Pioneer Square as well.  He didn’t reply.

    Other Options

    A more sensible and prudent approach to the problems in both areas would be to work with the landlords rather than bailing them out with public money.  Leave them with the risk whilst introducing local initiatives that help smaller retailers get a foothold and would also support the centre.

    These could include rates reductions, which Barry Wood dismissed out of hand when I challenged him on it during the election debate.  Neither he nor Sean Woodcock appeared to know that it has been within the gift of local councils to reduce rates on specific properties at their discretion for several years now.

    If they wanted to provide smaller, more affordable space for independent retailers, they could lease units from the centres on a medium to long term basis, probably negotiating favourable terms with the landlords as a council will have a very good covenant.  These could then be divided up (if required) and then sublet on flexible terms on reduced rents to retailers, although this would have to be agreed beforehand with the landlord for the same reasons discussed above concerning rental levels and valuations.

    This would achieve the same aim of revitalising schemes both in Banbury and Bicester and would not involve the council in risking large amounts of public money.  It would also mean that the bulk of the £60m they are now tying up in one area could be spread across the district.

    This is the kind of strategic thinking we need, rather that the amateurish speculation of a council who seems to want to play at being shopkeepers with our money.  This is why we need a more diverse representation on the council and councillors like me who will challenge these misguided moves before millions of pounds of desperately needed council funds are put at risk.