The New Local Government Network (NLGN) report, Capital Momentum: financing options for locally driven capital investment, argues that new funding strategies will be needed to save some of the £12billion of building projects under threat from Government spending reductions. With housing, transport and education likely to be worst hit councils should think now about how vital schemes could be funded through alternative sources. NLGN calls for local authorities to utilise the estimated £97bn in the Local Government Pension Fund to continue investment in infrastructure projects.

Whilst there remains a deficit in the LGPS, NLGN argues that devoting some of its funding towards building projects would offer a stable and long-term investment for the pension fund whilst also supporting local job creation and the wider local economy. Report author, Tom Symons, points towards the need for pension portfolios to have a diverse range of investments following nosedives in traditional forms of investment, such as the FTSE 100, over recent years.

Currently there is no mechanism for local government pension funds to invest directly in pooled infrastructure provided by English local authorities and related sub-regional and regional agencies. In March 2010, just 0.7 per cent of the UK’s total pension fund assets were invested in infrastructure, indicating the scale of untapped potential that exists.

The report also warns the Government not to curtail the ability of local authorities to raise money through the Public Works Loan Board, as has happened under previous economic downturns. The report argues that this form of ‘prudential borrowing’ is vital to ensuring that infrastructure projects are well resourced.

NLGN also argues that in the future it may be necessary to use US-style municipal bonds for projects with a defined revenue stream, such as leisure centers or transport projects. If restrictions were placed on council borrowing by central Government, off-balance sheet ‘revenue bonds’ could be one of the few remaining ways of financing such projects. However, the report also concludes that municipal bonds would not currently represent an economically sound form of borrowing for local authorities while there are no limits on borrowing from the PWLB.

On the reforms proposed, Tom Symons, Senior Researcher at NLGN said:

“There is a real risk that future economic growth will be undermined by infrastructure that is unable to meet the demands of a modern, globalised economy. This provides a key imperative to find or design mechanisms that can sustain investment throughout a period of national fiscal consolidation.”

“Pension funds present enormous potential to invest in infrastructure. Just 1 per cent of the Local Government Pension Scheme1 would produce close to £1bn of investment opportunity for local capital projects. To bring this funding in, we need to adopt new investment vehicles that can operate at a scale, size and geography that creates the delicate combination of risk, return and social benefit that is required to incentivise a pension fund to invest.”

Publishing a on the future of public service inspection, NLGN warns that wholesale abolition of assessment regimes could risk “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” and instead suggests that inspections of key services should move to a ‘risk-based’ weighted approach that would offer intensive support to underperforming councils but much more infrequent and lighter inspection to those performing well.

Having only been in place since 2009, CAA has been criticised for being too expensive and overly burdensome. A number of local authorities have publicly announced that they will limit the amount of time afforded to collating data for the inspectorate. Government plans to scrap CAA may lead to local authorities only being held to account through elections and through more transparent listing of their spending and decision making.

Under NLGN’s model, citizens would be encouraged to take a greater role in service provision and in holding their public services to account. They would be able to petition the LGA if they feel that the quality of a specific local service is declining or is not up-to-standards and if the internal procedure of the council or service is not satisfactory. Citizens would also be given access to more transparent information on how council money is spent, as a means of strengthening local democracy, and be invited to act as “bare-foot” assessors of local services.

The report also points towards a redefined role for the Audit Commission, which would focus more on financial auditing functions and on being a gate-keeper for other inspectorates such as OFSTED and the Care Quality Commission.

The local government family, led by the LGA, would take on a greater role in supporting underperforming councils and providing peer-led reviews.

Author of the report and NLGN Researcher Olivier Roth said:

“Each year local authorities spend around £150 billion of public money and it is therefore fundamental how we assess our public services and allow citizens a fair voice in monitoring them. We should enhance the role that citizens can play in holding their local public services to account through transparency and increased citizen engagement. Transparency and clear accountability must sit at the heart of the response, so that citizens have the necessary tools with which to hold elected politicians and officials to account. Effective assessment can underpin local democracy.

“One of the lessons of CAA is that adversarial and external inspections can only take improvement so far. For improvement to be real and lasting, it has to be embraced by the organisation attempting to improve. It is local government that possesses the experience, the skills and the mindset to identify possible improvements, and to find the right solutions to enable them. The assessment process should be owned by the local government family, as it possesses the required democratic legitimacy, buy in, and know-how needed to implement real and substantial changes.”

At the report launch, Cllr David Parsons praised the report as “a timely contribution to the debate on the future of audit and inspection.” Gareth Davies affirmed the report’s thesis that “independent local audit is fundamentally important” and Dr. Ita O’Donovan declared that we need to be “much more imaginative at the local level” as we decide upon the future of audit and assessment.

Local councils could be hit with funding cuts of at least a third from central government according to new research from the think tank New Local Government Network (NLGN).

Analysing figures from the recent Budget, NLGN is predicting that this could leave councils with a funding reduction of over £12 billion, which could lead to services being cut or charges for local services increasing.

The report, Scanning Financial Horizons, warns that councils must be given greater financial certainty from Whitehall and greater flexibility to raise local revenue if it is to cope with the cuts. NLGN recommends the introduction of new “Place Agreements” of shared public spending across the local state and for local authorities to have full discretion over Council Tax levels as well as the ability to retain a slice of business rates locally to incentivise economic growth.

The Chancellor George Osborne has already announced reductions of £1.165 billion to local authority budgets for this year but NLGN predicts that these will be “relatively small compared with the tsunami of funding cuts that will hit councils over the course of this parliament”.

Scanning Financial Horizons also publishes polling evidence showing that councils are already preparing to cut the range of services they provide whilst the public are not prepared to accept service cuts. In a survey of council Chief Executives and Finance Directors the report finds that the majority are expecting to cut their budgets by between 20-25% and almost a third anticipating the gap to be wider than that.

Those surveyed also said that environmental services such as street cleaning and waste collection were most likely to be cut alongside cultural services such as parks, museums and libraries.

In a separate poll of public attitudes to service cuts, conducted by Populus, the results showed widespread opposition to local service cuts, particularly to areas such as waste collection and social care. The survey showed a lack of support for any cuts to local services and a preference for increased taxation rather than service cuts to maintain local service levels.

Author of Scanning Financial Horizons, Nick Hope said that councils are due to face unprecedented fiscal challenges over the next few years:

“A tsunami of funding cuts will hit councils over this parliamentary term. If demands on local government expenditure were to remain static in this period then meeting them would be tough, but demands on expenditure such as in social care are likely to grow, making the scale of the challenge even greater. Local government will have to climb up a downward moving escalator if services are not to hit rock bottom.

With some areas of Government spending protected, our research indicates that the burden of cuts placed on councils will be substantial, meaning that local authorities are having to explore tough choices about how finances are allocated and how to cut services and increase charges.

Our research shows significant public opposition to reduced services, meaning that councils may be stuck in an impossible position of having to match high public expectations without the financial means to do so.

A full and public debate should take place and the fundamental role and purpose of the local authority should be reassessed, in order to redefine and renegotiate the relationship between councils and the public. Local communities must arrive at a feasible new service settlement about what councils can provide and what citizens and community groups could take on themselves, with proper support, in the future.

Radical efficiency options are being explored by many councils, but they must be given additional fiscal tools, such as greater funding certainty and financial flexibility from the Treasury, if they are to minimise the impact on frontline services.”

NLGN’s latest paper, Making Sense of Entitlement, argues that the use of entitlements and guarantees to citizens replicates many of the problems of traditional performance targets and restricts the ability of services to focus on the needs of their local communities. It concludes that users would benefit and better outcomes could be achieved more efficiently if public services were subject to less central instruction, as long as the necessary safeguards of transparency, scrutiny and accountability to local citizens are in place.

Entitlements offering public service users a number of guaranteed commitments from public services were a prominent feature of policy under the previous government. They included:

• Maximum waiting times in the NHS
  
• Free care at home for older people and the disabled
  
• ‘September Guarantee’ offering all 16 and 17 year old school leavers a guaranteed place in education or training
  
• One-to-one tuition for all school children falling behind in English and Maths

NLGN’s report highlights the considerable evidence that uniform entitlements distort the priorities of frontline staff away from providing the best possible service, towards fulfilling specific entitlements at the behest of civil servants in Whitehall. Entitlements such as the NHS waiting times are also vulnerable to manipulation, for example holding A&E patients in ambulances so as to process them within the four hour maximum wait.

As such NLGN recommends that:

1. 1) Priorities and policy aims should be formulated on the basis of a negotiated agreement between central government and the local authority based on policy objectives and the needs of the local community. Drawing on the findings from the Total Place pilots, NLGN proposes that such a ‘Place Agreement’ should define clear service outcomes to be achieved locally and include additional devolution of funding and powers to meet these objectives.

2. 2) To provide the necessary safeguards, both central and local government should ensure that public service outcomes are clearly transparent and accountable to citizens. This should be done through a series of measures including e-transparency, an assessment system focused fundamentally on the citizen, and greater scrutiny from the local government family. Such a system will be the focus of NLGN’s forthcoming report in July 2010 on the ‘Future of Assessment’.

3. 3) Where the Coalition Government chooses to maintain or introduce future entitlements, that these should be broad and outcome-focused, rather than narrow and procedural, to allow local bodies flexibility to meet the needs of their community. The Policing pledge commitment to spending time on the beat working to agreed neighbourhood priorities is a positive example.

4. 4) Local authorities should be given greater responsibility for services such as healthcare and policing – strengthening joined up working and giving a cohesive democratic mandate to locally-responsive priorities.

Luke Hildyard, the report author said:

‘Fears of public services suffering as a result of the abandonment of entitlements are unfounded. Equivalently resourced services ought to be capable of producing better outcomes if they are subject to less central instruction, not worse. Provided the necessary safeguards of transparency, scrutiny and accountability to citizens are in place, public service users will benefit if the coalition’s move towards a more devolved, locally-focused system of public service management leads to the scaling down of uniform national guarantees’

With figures showing[1] that more than a third of low earners are finding it difficult to access credit during the recession, NLGN argues that the Government should build on its commitment this week to provide a basic bank account for all by supporting councils to provide accessible and affordable credit.

NLGN argues that there is significant interest within local government for greater powers and unveils new polling evidence showing that:

• Over 70% of council leaders want to consider how they could further help their residents access affordable credit and banking facilities;
• Over 62% of council leaders said that they would opt for an LAA target in their top 35 priorities if ‘tackling financial exclusion’ had been available in the indicator set;
• Over 80% of council leaders said that they would be keen to support new banking facilities for their residents.

The report also recommends that:

• CLG and Treasury should commission a series of pathfinder ‘pilot projects’ in partnership with local councils to explore the scope for direct local authority banking services;
• Mainstream banks should be obliged to provide easier access to banking and credit for hard-pressed communities through a UK version of the American ‘Community Reinvestment Act’;
• The Treasury should create a ‘community banking capitalisation fund’ available for local authorities to draw down resources and in turn help provide financial support to local Credit Unions and CDFIs;
• The Treasury, FSA and Bank of England should launch a joint taskforce with the Local Government Association to consider enhancing the involvement of local authorities in improving credit conditions and combating recession;
• The forthcoming ‘Post Office Banking Consultation’ paper should acknowledge the work already undertaken by third sector and local authority partners in the roll out of community banking services, and ensure that any strategy supplements rather than duplicates this work.

Author of the report, NLGN Director Chris Leslie argues that:

“While the UK economy may be beginning to recover from the very worst effects of the credit crunch, the problems that it has left in its wake may be with us for some time to come. Financial exclusion is not an issue that will be resolved simply by returning the economy to growth, and a great deal of effort is needed to ensure that a new generation of victims do not emerge. Central government has invested an enormous amount of money simply to avoid a full-scale depression, and questions remain over what effect the inevitable drawing down of assistance will have. On a broader level, the events of the past two years have also shown us just how dangerous it can be to allow a select few institutions to dominate lending markets.”

“Local authorities, who deal with the problems caused by the downturn on the front line everyday, are uniquely placed to offer interventions which increase the supply of credit to those who need it most. There are a number of options open to them which ought to be explored. But to fully realise these, central government will have to buy-in to the process as well, eschewing a ‘top-down’ model of economic support and taking proactive steps to encourage positive local action by councils.”

In one of the most detailed studies so far on Total Place, the research finds that whilst billions of savings could be achieved at the local level by better joined-up services, a lack of coherence between Government departments and a historic reluctance to devolve threatens to derail the project. The report is timed to inform the debate around the future of Total Place before further announcements are made in the Budget.

NLGN’s report argues that major change is needed at the centre to break existing top-down models and cultures of accountability and service delivery, which lead to significant inefficiency and wastage in public services. For instance, one local pilot uncovered as many as 50 different benefits each with their own form, rules and administrative machinery; another has calculated that it costs as much as £135m to spend £176m on economic development projects. NLGN’s analysis shows that major benefits can be unlocked by a more collaborative approach to public sector assets and building services around the citizen at a local level.

The report advocates the setting up of a new Department for Devolved Government to subsume CLG and the Cabinet Office and the Scottish and Welsh offices to drive devolution across Whitehall and release greater freedoms and powers for locally elected politicians to coordinate activity and decide how and where services are delivered. As part of this, accountability for public health budgets and local policing should be devolved immediately to all local authorities.

It also argues that localities and national government should come to a new series of deals on devolving public money and delivery responsibilities across a wider range of services such as employment and skills. These Place Proposition Agreements would allow local areas to set out how they could provide improved services for less money as a response to the expected cuts in public sector budgets.

Further recommendations in the NLGN report include:

• Allowing councils full discretion over spend across regeneration, transport and housing in a single capital pot;
  
• Establishing a new Joint Parliamentary and Local Government ‘Total Place Progress Committee’ comprised of MPs and local council leaders to scrutinise cross-government activity;
  
• Strengthening existing Local Strategic Partnership arrangements and moving towards more statutory, incorporated and focused Public Service Boards;
  
• Undertaking total counts of public resources and asset mapping across all local areas as a catalyst for collaborative approaches;
  
• Setting up a Collaborative Leadership Academy to develop leadership across the public sector.

‘The concept of aligning all public resources in an area around the needs of its community is simple and commonsense. Putting it into practice, however, remains a major challenge not just for local areas but also for Whitehall. The changes needed go way beyond merely removing a few ring-fenced budgets or performance targets. Our cultures of governing and our current systems of funding and accountability cut through and undermine our focus on what the citizen needs.

‘With public sector budgets under pressure, it is more important now than ever that we seek to institute reforms that can ensure the most targeted and efficient responses to our local communities. This must include greater freedoms, responsibilities and resources at the local level.’

NLGN’s report was undertaken with support from Cap Gemini, Grant Thornton, Leadership Centre for Local Government and London Councils.

• Abusing social housing should change from a civil to a criminal offence
  
• 50,000 properties estimated to be unlawfully sub-let
  
• Call backed by the Chartered Institute of Housing
  
• Savings of £750m could be made by recovering all unlawfully sub-let properties

Social housing tenants who sub-let their properties should be prosecuted for fraud according to a new NLGN report. Under current rules, sub-letting social housing is a civil offence but the New Local Government Network (NLGN) is calling for it to be treated the same as benefit fraud in the eyes of the law. The think-tank’s report claims that at least 50,000 people are fraudulently living in social housing costing councils thousands of pounds and depriving those in real need of housing.

Unlawful subletting refers to situations in which a tenant in social housing violates the conditions of their tenancy by renting their property out to individuals not permitted to live there by the conditions of tenancy. It is estimated that 80% of people living in fraudulently rented social housing would not themselves qualify for council help.

In November 2009 the Government announced a ‘National Crackdown’ on fraudulent sub-letting, offering £500 rewards to members of the public who provide information that helps to catch cheating landlords. However the NLGN argues that the problem won’t be sufficiently tackled unless it is treated as seriously as other kinds of fraud, such as benefit fraud. It is calling for an addition to be made to the Housing Act so that the 2006 Fraud Act can be used to prosecute individuals subletting social housing. The call has been backed by the Chartered Institute of Housing.

According to estimates from the Audit Commission, each unlawfully sub-let property costs local councils an average of £75,000 over three years. It also restricts the ability of local authorities to accommodate the 1.76million households on the social housing waiting list. According to the NLGN research, there is strong support from housing professionals to make the offence illegal with 92% of those surveyed agreeing that the measure would help to tackle unlawful sub-letting.

Report author Tom Symons said:

“The costs associated with unlawful subletting demand action that goes beyond a quick one-off crackdown and instead seeks to effect legal change as well as a major shift in societal attitudes towards tenancy fraud.

It is imperative that central government now makes the changes that will enable local authorities to galvanise their anti-tenancy fraud efforts and minimise the high social and financial costs of unlawful subletting.”

Joanne Kent-Smith, Senior Policy and Practice Officer, Chartered Institute of Housing

“At a time when demand for existing social housing significantly outstrips supply, tackling unauthorised subletting and occupancy is an important challenge for social landlords, and one which can be both complex and resource intensive. The government has recently provided funding to support the sector increase activity in this area and improve working practices. The CIH welcomes this report which reviews the surrounding policy and legislative framework, and argues for changes that would assist social landlords overcome obstacles.”

Unlawful Sub-letting – in numbers

Average cost per year of housing a family in temporary accommodation – £11,000
No. of families in temporary accommodation – 64,000
Estimated % of social housing in London that is unlawfully sub-let – between 2.5% – 5%
Estimated number of unlawfully sub-let properties nationally – 50,000
No. of families on the social housing waiting list – 1.76 million
Estimated cost of a sublet property over 3 years – £75,000
Income per year of a sub-let property in London – £12-20,000
Estimated minimum cost of recovering an unlawfully sub-let property – £4,000
Cost of building a new socially rented house – £67,000-100,000+
Estimated asset value of all unlawfully sub-let properties – £2bn

With David Cameron committed to referendums on elected city mayors in 12 English cities should the Conservatives win the election, NLGN argues that a high level suite of powers needs to be devolved in order to incentivise city-regional mayors (characterised in the paper as ‘platinum level’ powers) and similarly a set of further powers (‘gold level’) needs to be granted for all other elected mayors. Both reforms would see mayors receiving additional powers to the ones they currently hold, trailblazing the decentralisation to local government in general.

There are currently 13 elected mayors in England and some have been credited with developing new forms of civic leadership and tackling long-term problems. However, presently only the Mayor of London has wider strategic power over areas such as transport and policing and overall England lacks well-known and influential civic mayors such as Mayor Bloomberg in New York or Pasqual Maragall in Barcelona.

The report argues that strong local leadership and vision is needed to take bold decisions and citizens need to be better engaged in choices about what can be realistically delivered, particularly with constraints on public spending likely in the coming years. It suggests that elected mayors are well placed to execute this function, and their high visibility and public profile can help capture the attention of the media and citizens.

Publishing today’s proposals, co-authors Nirmalee Wanduragala and Nick Hope argue that further incentives are needed to encourage strong civic leadership and to allow mayors to reach their full potential. Among the recommendations are:

Financial

City mayors should be able to balance their budget over a four-year period, allowing them greater financial flexibility to raise and lower Council Tax. They should also be granted the power to introduce a supplementary business rate of up to + or – 4p, with any extra funds raised to be spent on economic development within the city as deemed best by the mayor.

Public Services

Mayors representing a city-region should be given transport powers that mirror more closely those that the Mayor of London currently enjoys, in particular through chairing (or the nomination of chair) of the local transport body.

City-region mayors should also have the power to appoint a new post of City or Area Police Commissioner or have the right to appoint themselves to the role.

City-region mayors should have power to appointment the Chief Executive of the local Primary Care Trust and to nominate one person to sit as a non-executive member on the board of the PCT.

Democracy

City and city-region mayors should be able to appoint the chief executive of their local authority.

City-region mayors should be automatically granted a seat in the second chamber of the Houses of Parliament, to counter current under-representation of regional perspectives.

However, NLGN also argues that candidates for mayoral contests should be chosen using a US-style Primaries system to encourage people from outside of politics to stand and create a “unique mandate”. Primaries could be based on an “open” system where anyone, regardless of party affiliation, could stand as a candidate, but with the final decision left to party members or supporters. In London a primary was held to find the Conservative candidate for the mayoral elections, where Boris Johnson was selected. In Bedford the Conservative Party also selected their Mayoral candidate through an open primary.

The authors justify the radical plan for Open Primaries by arguing that “more people from a wider range of backgrounds should have the opportunity to shape the rules and take part in decision-making at all levels in our country. If we are ever to see a renaissance of civic involvement, we need everyone to have the chance to identify with somebody in a position of power. We need to open up politics the party selection process for mayoral candidates should be extended beyond party members.”

The report authors also point towards mayors providing more visible leadership, citing polling evidence that, after just 12 to 18 months mayors being elected, on average 57% of people could identify their mayor, compared to only 25% who could identify their leader in councils without a mayor. They also argue that having an elected mayor was instrumental in London’s successful bid to secure the 2012 Olympic bid.

Report authors Wanduragala and Hope conclude:

“Mayors, with their local mandate, are well placed to be granted wide-ranging delegated powers to help transform the way communities and citizens are served. They provide clear lines of accountability, demarcated responsibility, and effective leadership so that it is clear to everyone “where the buck stops”. Ministers can be confident that they will not to be held responsible by the electorate or the media for the particular actions of an administration in a locality.”

The economic downturn has seen employment in the UK rise to 7.9%, with almost 2.5 million people out of work, just under a million of which are aged between 16-25. In a new report, NLGN argues that a place-based approach is needed for employment and skills, with greater local economic activism by councils to steer funding towards particular sectors to stimulate new jobs.

It recommends that ‘skills accounts’ are reshaped to give individuals more choice over the training they receive and councils greater democratic strategic control, by enabling them to vary the public subsidy for different skills training options based on current and future local economic needs. With such a system, a local authority seeking to diversify the local economy to make it more resilient in the future may, for example, wish to increase jobs in renewable technologies, and could direct skills funding to meet the skills needs of that particular sector.

The report also advocates streamlining some existing skills quangos to create an integrated and less cluttered employment and skills system. It suggests merging current national and regional skills agencies into one organisation – the UK Commission for Employment and Skills – and devolving all operational functions to local authorities.

Report author Nick Hope argues that councils must also do far more themselves to stimulate demand for jobs, by creating the environment for new dynamic business opportunities and acting themselves to forge a new era of municipal entrepreneurship. He suggests that the Government should take forward proposals in their Smarter Government White Paper to allow councils to use their trading powers to create commercial opportunities.

Report author Nick Hope said:

“We must urgently and fundamentally reconstruct the architecture of the skills and employment system, to allow a far more devolved and flexible approach that is not based around programmes, age-categories and funding streams but around the specific needs of particular places and, crucially, individuals.”

“We need to move beyond the concept of “demand-led” skills, where employers and learners drive learning but risk perpetuating a short-sited approach that reinforces industrial weaknesses, towards a “place-led’ era, rooted in an area’s unique assets, characteristics and economic potential. Local authorities must be at the heart of this new era, working collaboratively to orchestrate opportunities and drive economic growth.”

• 15% of high street shops likely to be empty by Christmas
  
• Councils urged to offer business rate incentives for new companies
  
• Call for more independent shops to stop ‘Ghost Town Britain’

As the number of high street stores closing increases, a think tank is today (Mon) calling for councils to step in and offer local businesses tax incentives if they invest in their area.

Independent think tank the New Local Government Network (NLGN) is calling on the Government to allow councils to offer lower business rates to incentivise new businesses offset the cost by instigating new powers to increase rates on businesses that could be detrimental to the local area such as betting shops, fast-food takeaways and cheque-cashing stores. It also suggests that councils should have the power to take over existing private shops if there are no plans to fill then and offer them as premises to local businesses.

The report, High-Noon for the High Street also says that local small businesses should be subsidised to take over empty shops in an attempt to reverse ‘Ghost Town Centres’. High Street stores have been hit hard by a combination of the recession and an increase in out of town and internet shopping. Figures estimate that 15% of shops are likely to be empty by the end of 2009 whilst 70% of former Woolworths stores remain empty.

NLGN says it wants councils to support local commerce by taking over empty shops and offering them to local entrepreneurs and small businesses without premises on a basis of free or low-level rent. It says that councils could even own a stake in their business – as in the TV show Dragon’s Den – in exchange for offering subsidised rents. The report also calls for a renaissance in local, independent high street shops, pointing towards evidence that shows that money spent in a chain store is less likely to stay in its locality than a local shop.

The report also argues for “a level playing field” on out of town shopping developments and suggests that the Government could introduce a levy on large-scale developments which could then be spent on enhancing the high-street or town centre. It also points out that many high streets are subject to parking charges whilst out of town shopping centres generally offer free parking, so suggests that councils introduce a small parking levy on out of town developments to pay for a reduction in town centre fees or increased investment in public transport.

The report is published on the last Monday before Christmas – traditionally one of the busiest shopping days of the year. It also comes as online retailers are predicted to have a record year – another blow to high street stores.

Co-author of the report, James Hulme argue that more must be done to save traditional high streets:

“Local councils need to take a pro-enterprise approach to saving the British High Street and responding to the cycle of decline in our town centre. Only the will we get the High Street off the low road.”

“Whilst High Street shops face numerous challenges within these difficult economic circumstances, there is also an opportunity to refresh and redesign how our town centres look and encourage local, independent businesses”

“Councils should be empowered with new rates-levying powers to encourage local small businesses and entrepreneurs, paid for by targeting businesses that often take away more from an area than they give back. This could allow town centres to again become vibrant places for local people to shop, meet and go out”