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Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2014

16 Jan 2014 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Town Centre Action Plan

McCulloch, Margaret Lab Central Scotland Watch on SPTV

As convener of the cross-party group on towns and town centres, I am very keen for the future of our town centres to be pushed up the political agenda. Accordingly, I welcome this afternoon’s debate.

I also join colleagues in welcoming the broad aims of the town centre action plan as well as the work of Malcolm Fraser and his external advisory group, which has informed so much of the Government’s thinking on town centres. Many of the ideas coming out of the review and the action plan, including mixed-use town centres, digital towns, community enterprise and regeneration are sound and have received broad support.

However, what I have learned from the Fraser review and my experience in the cross-party group is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to town centre regeneration. For example, solutions for my home town of East Kilbride, which is a new town with a big retail-focused town centre, will be different from Hamilton down the road, which has adopted the business improvement district model. That point is crucial because as Business Improvement Districts Scotland, the Association of Town and City Management, Development Trusts Scotland and Scotland’s Towns Partnership will tell us, towns have to develop their own unique selling point to be resilient in an economy that is increasingly dominated by online sales and out-of-town retail.

I want to make three specific points about the action plan’s content. First, on business rates, Labour remains, despite claims to the contrary, committed to the uniform business rate and the small business bonus, although we believe that the latter could have been targeted in a smarter, sharper way. As Labour has argued for greater flexibility in rates to incentivise growth at the local level, I am very interested in the incentivisation proposals in the action plan. However, certain issues are coming up time and again, with town centre traders telling us not only that the valuations are out of kilter with the property market but that the process of appealing an assessor’s decision is time consuming, convoluted and sometimes just impenetrable for local firms.

Secondly, on town centre living, I want to bring Paisley to the chamber’s attention. In its study visit last year, the cross-party group visited a number of Renfrewshire towns and found Paisley to be interesting because the BID’s vision for the town is about not just retail but people living and socialising in the town centre. Although the town centre housing fund is welcome, it must be part of a wider regeneration strategy for our towns and we should also be clear that it is a drop in the ocean with regard to meeting housing needs in Scotland.

Finally, on the town centre first principle, which Gavin Brown referred to in his speech, I think that it is good but it would be helpful if Police Scotland, the Scottish Court Service and the Post Office Ltd also recognised it. However, I notice from parliamentary answers that no definition of what “town centre first” actually means has been agreed by the Scottish Government and COSLA.

The truest criticism of an otherwise welcome action plan is that many of the points that it contains will take time to implement and that is time that some businesses simply do not have. For example, although I expect the community empowerment bill to become very important to anyone who is interested in regenerating our town centres, the consultation period has not even closed yet.

I wish the minister well in putting this plan into practice, but will conclude simply by impressing upon him the urgency of putting in place measures to make Scotland’s towns more resilient and attractive, even in these testing times.

16:25

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Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2014

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