Meeting of the Parliament 12 January 2016
I, too, thank Gordon MacDonald for bringing the debate to the chamber. I welcome the debate because, as many members will be aware, I represent the great town of Paisley, which has faced many of the challenges that have been mentioned in the retail sector over the past 10 to 15 years. The media automatically tend to take a picture of Paisley High Street when they want to make a point about how dramatically things have changed. However, although the retail giants have moved out of town, the convenience stores are still in my town centre, serving and working with the community.
That is important, because there is still a demographic among my constituents who do most of their shopping in the town centre. The elderly and those from poorer backgrounds have more difficulties shopping out of town. That is borne out in the report, which states that 78 per cent of convenience store customers travel less than a mile to use their local store; that 58 per cent travel to their local store by foot, compared with 38 per cent who drive; and that 25 per cent of customers use their local shop every day.
That is mirrored in my constituency, where there are small pockets of successful local shops throughout our town. For town centres such as Paisley to succeed, we must encourage those stores and ensure that they get the opportunity to develop further, because they are the ones that are still contributing to our local economy.
I remember a comment from a number of years back, when there was initial talk about welfare reform. It was said that, from a retail perspective, welfare reform would cost Paisley town centre about £1 million a year, because it is the old and the poorer individuals who shop in the town centre. All those things have to be taken into account, because they are the people who are making sure that we have a local shop to go to.
It is interesting that one of the top three stores that everyone wants to have in their area is a specialist food shop, such as a traditional butcher, which we still have a number of locally. They were extremely busy during the festive period, although they tend to slow up, but they are still the only type of business where people can get certain products. Shops such as independent butchers and grocers make our town centres thrive because they offer something that is slightly different and a service that people can no longer get elsewhere. They hark back to a time when the shopkeeper knew everybody’s name and knew who his customer base was, and we do not want to lose that.
Last week, I spoke—ironically, it was during a debate on lobbying—about an independent bookshop that we used to have in Paisley town centre. Three or four generations of the same family owned that store but, with the internet and the chance to buy a book and have it delivered straight to the door, and with the opportunity to buy e-books, they could not compete.
A town centre loses something when it loses that type of shop. The irony is that the rest of the top three shops that people want is banks and post offices—businesses whose business model has been changing over recent years. I have constantly spoken to the minister about the major banks pulling out of certain areas. They are part of the retail ecology of every high street and town centre as well, and they have to take on a responsibility, because shops and retailers need them, too.
I believe that small retailers are the solution to our town centre problems. I thank Gordon MacDonald again for bringing the debate to the chamber. I wish all the retailers all the best, but I encourage everyone to try to shop in local stores, as I did recently in my town when buying Christmas presents. We need to lead from the front and support such traders, because it is all too easy for a store to go the same way as the bookshop that I mentioned. When it is no longer there, people will wonder what happened to it.
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