Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street has become emblematic with the discourse around Scotland’s High Streets. Over the last five years, as the retail industry responded to Covid closures, enormous inflationary pressures, transformative technology and customer choice changes, it has been a visual reminder of the enormous challenges facing Scotland’s town and city centres.
Yet for all the doom and gloom, the closures, the endless streetworks, it remains a retail destination. Many shops have closed, but others remain, alongside coffee shops, eateries, and bars. Battered and bruised perhaps, but this high street, and plenty others, are not quite dead yet.
That survival is a tribute to the robustness and adaptability of the Scottish retail industry. Despite challenge after challenge retailers have got on with the job; serving customers, innovating, doing everything possible to keep down prices, promoting their products through new media, making shops run with fewer staff hours each month.
But it’s also a reflection that the retail industry knows there is still huge value in our high streets. For all the convenience of online and out-of-town retail those are different settings which don’t work for every product. Especially when trying to appeal to customers with products they want rather than those they need the vibrancy of Glasgow or Edinburgh and our other major conurbations absolutely matters.
High streets at their best have a life of their own. The mixture of residents, workers and visitors combined with the mix of leisure, culture, hospitality and of course retail create an experience. The bustle of busy stores, cafes, and bars, creates the excitement which encourages that small moment of indulgence which high street retail exists to satisfy. Great centres take that spark of interest and fan it into a flame of exploration.
Yet we know high streets are struggling. Last year footfall fell on average by 0.9 percent across Scotland whilst non-food retail sales rose by a miserly 0.7 percent; far below inflation. For all the theatre and excitement, the cold numbers mean retailers can often make a greater return by investing in online than high streets. That is of course what has been happening – every retailer of scale now has some form of online sales presence.
The scale of change is enormous, and to be honest there isn’t space to cover it in depth here. Enlighten are kindly hosting a discussion on the 22nd of October where our Insight Director Dr Kris Hamer is going to be joined by the President of high street stalwarts schuh Colin Temple and the SRC’s Chair, and executive board director for Dobbies Garden Centre, Debbie Harding to discuss all things retail and consumer. That will be a great chance to hear from the real experts on the detail around retail transformation.
However, the simple truth is many retailers in fact are only able to operate on the high street because of that online model – something uninformed commentators who seem to think ‘taxing online’ will somehow help the high street often forget. It’s a bizarre idea to assert that an over-taxed retail industry (retail is worth around 7 percent of the economy but pays over 20 percent of non-domestic rates) would be helped by paying more taxes.
Instead of hobbling the more successful parts of the industry policymakers need to put high streets at the heart of their economic strategy. Earlier this month the Scottish Retail Consortium published our first mini-manifesto on Protecting Scotland’s Future High Streets with a five-point plan to revitalise these destinations.
That starts with taxation. Currently over 2,400 Scottish shops, many of them the large shops which anchor our high streets and disproportionately drive footfall, pay a higher business rate than the equivalent English store due to the Scottish Governments Higher Property Rate. This fleecing of retailers in Scotland costs them £9 million each and every year and has done so for a decade. With Westminster on the cusp of reforming their own rates system to give a permanent discount to retail, the current and next Scottish Government will need to go further to make Scottish high streets attractive propositions for investment.
Perhaps as crucial is the timeframe for that return on investment. Right now the planning and building warrants system isn’t fit for purpose. Businesses talk with exasperation about the long delays to get permission to refit or take over high street stores. This isn’t about the policy framework, it’s about delivery. So the next government needs to increase the number of planning and building standards officers to speed up the decision-making process. Businesses need to know much more quickly if they can proceed – if there is uncertainty then the capital will be used elsewhere. Similarly the status quo where businesses need to wait for a building warrant before they can start improvements should adapt to the standard approach elsewhere of permitting work to begin once an application is submitted. It also wouldn’t do any harm to break up the local authority monopoly on providing building warrants as well and allow external providers, again as happens elsewhere in the UK.
The third area of focus needs to be on making high streets accessible through making it as easy as possible for visitors to come to the city or town centre. That means investing in both public, but also private, transport options. There is a very virtuous school of thought which appears desperate to make it as difficult as possible for car users to travel to and park adjacent to the town or city centre. The reality is when that approach successfully deters drivers from visiting it doesn’t force a modal shift in their transport choices – they just drive to places they can park at. The opposite approach, which to be fair the current Scottish Government is pushing through abolishing peak fares, where public transport is made more appealing, is much more likely to lead to increased footfall, and then hopefully sales.
Perhaps the single biggest concern retailers raise right now is crime. Official figures show both shop theft and shopworker abuse and assault have risen year on year. The SRC’s crime survey found last year that theft cost the industry over £170 million in Scotland last year; whilst there were over 4000 assaults. Of course that is an unacceptable and horrifying burden for businesses to ensure. Yet it also has a huge impact on shoppers. If customers witness theft or violence on the high street then they aren’t going to come back, especially with their families. Physical retail relies on people having an experience; that isn’t possible if shoppers are scared. So while Police Scotland are doing everything in their power, and the addition of a retail crime task force is a valuable first step, greater and sustained funding is needed to give the police the tools they need to tackle and bear down on retail crime. However, there remains a question of priorities, which is why the SRC believes the time is right to explore whether a directly elected Scottish Police Commissioner could be right. Retailers in Wales and England tells us the Police Commissioners there work well.
Where we have seen town centres flourish is when the right framework is led by local leadership invested in a unique approach right for their community. We’re hearing good reports from members about the joint efforts – from the private and public sectors – underway in Aberdeen to reinvigorate Union Street and reduce the number of empty units and attract footfall. One place where this is desperately needed is Glasgow, where shopper footfall remains becalmed well below pre-Covid levels. The city has many strengths including the extensive local rail network and subway and with the Argyll Arcade it has the leading jewellery and watches retailing destination outside of London. However, the challenge in Glasgow is the city centre itself is in competition with the outlying areas, and of course the relative levels of affluence create further perverse incentives for individual councils. There is a case for examining whether the lessons from the West Midlands and Manchester, where directly elected Mayors have been able to use their convening powers to drive forward regeneration, could be applied to create a greater Glasgow authority, where a directly elected Provost and a small number of Councillors could replace the current hodgepodge of councils covering a shared economic area.
Of course high street regeneration is part of a wider story about how we rebuild our economy after the last five years of disruption and difficulty. There is no doubt a good burst of economic growth would make everything a little easier. But even if the economy bounced back next year, the reality is our town and city centres need to be put on the path to sustained prosperity. However, with the right decisions from government, we can continue to confidently dispel the myth of the death of the high street.
Ewan MacDonald-Russell is Deputy Head of the Scottish Retail Consortium