Although it never really went away, supporting and reviving our town centres is now firmly back in the policy spotlight.
The new PM has trailed measures to control the proliferation of vape shops, protect pubs through the National Planning Policy Framework, and offer business rate support for some hospitality businesses. These sit alongside High Street Rental Auctions, Community Right to Buy and many other initiatives.
Regardless of your view of these ideas, which receive a large amount of policy development, debate and attention, they are simply tools to be applied within individual places.
The question that, remarkably, receives little attention is: who is responsible for making all these interventions add up to transformational change in an individual place?
I would suggest the difficult part isn’t having another tool. It’s having the people with the capability to understand the idiosyncrasies of their places, build a coalition around a compelling vision, navigate the sea of competing interests that we find in all places, and turn that vision into sustained action.
This is difficult work.
While some of the initiatives listed above may well have value, they are individual interventions within a much larger and more complex situation. And complex our centres certainly are.
They are made up of a rich and diverse mix of people and organisations, businesses, community groups, residents and services, all with differing priorities and needs. Then there is the physical environment: buildings, public spaces, infrastructure and the unique geographic factors that shape every place. Alongside this sit local, regional and national policy and regulatory frameworks, as well as the various sources of funding.
Understanding how to knit all these factors together behind a clear and compelling high street strategy that is designed for a specific place, and then deliver it, is no mean feat. It requires tenacity, expertise and knowledge from our place leaders.
In view of this, it strikes me that there is a large omission in the town centre revitalisation debate and subsequent policy announcements: that of ensuring our towns and districts are equipped with the very best place leaders.
People who can inspire, motivate and collaborate. People who have vision and passion for their places and communities, but who can also think strategically with a clear eye for delivering transformational change in our towns.
This requires considerable skill and expertise.
In almost all other areas of life, where complex issues are being tackled, the fundamental importance of good leadership, and of course management, is recognised as paramount. In the public, private and community sectors there are leaders who have clearly defined roles and the subsequent professional support, tools and expertise to drive forward the necessary changes in their fields.
Yet our town centres are expected to embrace and then tackle the raft of complex and interconnected issues that they face without any clear expectation of who might lead such an approach, how they would lead it and, crucially, how they will be supported to do so.
The deficit of such a discussion at a national level is, in many respects, little short of extraordinary.
At a time when almost every other sector has local, regional and national leadership programmes and support, those in the place sector scarcely do. We are lucky that organisations such as the ATCM, IPM and the BID networks try to support their members, but this is very much organisationally led support.
Place hardware and software
Perhaps this is because the notion of ‘place’ can be a bit amorphous.
Ben Stephenson, my colleague at The High Street Consultancy, talks of place-shaping activities taking two distinct forms: place hardware actions and interventions, and place software actions and interventions. I think this is a useful way of looking at it.
The first, ‘hardware’, is about the physical environment, the buildings, spaces and infrastructure needed within a place.
The second, ‘software’ is about what happens within that environment: the identity, culture, relationships, social and business activity that make a place what it is and, ultimately, what makes it tick.
Both are important.
With the physical environment, there is a much more established professional and policy infrastructure around it. Whole industries are professionally equipped through training and funding to service the physical aspects of regeneration, with masterplans, funding programmes, development agreements and the expertise to deliver them.
These are necessary disciplines, especially in the bigger towns and cities.
However, alongside this there is a real and evident need for place leaders to be equipped and supported with the skills needed to understand and shape the people, partnerships, activity and identity of their places.
Yet what is missing is systematic investment in the people who have to make all these different elements work together.
What does a place leader actually do?
The entry point to being a true place leader carries one key requirement: a genuine desire to see tangible and beneficial improvements to the place that they either live in or have some responsibility for.
For the benefit of this piece, that is the town centre.
Even if you don’t live in your town centre, most likely you will identify with it, and how you perceive it often affects how you feel about where you live more generally. Nothing evokes passion quite like a failing town centre and this can stir people into action.
Such people can come from all walks of life.
At the professional end that might be a regeneration officer or councillor, or someone from an architectural company or development firm. At the other end it could be a local artist or creative, a retailer, or the chair of the local civic group.
Either way, it’s unlikely that many will be steeped in the expertise needed to be good place leaders in this broader sense.
Also, what they do as place leaders may vary considerably and require different skills.
There’s the principal place leader, the de facto leader who spearheads the mission of change and improvement within their place.
They may agitate, inspire and cajole in their efforts to create a movement within their towns, bringing together people and organisations with specific roles, skills or perspectives from across the town and beyond.
This requires a particular approach and skill set to meaningfully bring together differing perspectives and interests and get them aligned behind a shared vision, and ultimately a deliverable plan for change.
From my own experience, this is the most challenging part of the place transformation journey and yet there is almost no support available to equip these motivated people to help them.
Quite apart from the skills needed to bring a diverse group together, keeping them there behind a unified vision requires processes and governance, plus all the wider tools of partnership in whatever form that takes.
This is a whole discipline, yet once again there is little by way of any national conversation about how we can support places to do this.
The job of the principal place leader is also to practise distributed place leadership, to create a cadre of other place leaders in their towns who can bring their specific passion and expertise in a particular area to support their place.
This resource can be found in many places, yet is often largely untapped or left to get on with it in isolation.
The forces of creativity can be unleashed by bringing together the artists and makers in a place. Empty units can be repurposed by working together with landlords and property agents.
How about involving health providers in the conversation about how to bring health and wellbeing services directly into the town centre?
What about bringing the business and retail community together to think about the town’s offer, what else could be done and what support could be provided?
Schools, colleges and youth groups can help capture the involvement and energy of young people.
Others may be interested in cleaning and greening, putting events on, marketing and promotion, heritage, transport or accessibility. And yes, there are also the bigger strategic development opportunities for new services, leisure, business and housing uses.
The list is endless.
Yet in almost every place this latent expertise can be found. If curated and supported properly, behind a clear vision and associated short-, medium- and long-term plans, each of these people and organisations can play a significant place leadership role.
But again, this takes rigour, structure and a strategically tactical approach which, far from being something that happens in a warm, gentle community room conversation, is actually sharp, focused and outcome driven.
It’s backed by data and evidence. It requires systematic processes and a whole host of people skills to navigate the choppy waters of collaboration. Never mind some technical understanding of how to deliver certain outcomes.
Yet there is no national conversation on equipping our place leaders to help them.
That is not to say that the means and mechanisms of successful place leadership don’t exist. They do.
My own institute, the Institute of Place Management, has decades of practitioner and academic experience to help place leaders, most recently applied at scale through its running of the previous government’s High Street Task Force.
Likewise, the ATCM and BID networks, as well as other institutes and organisations, have significant knowledge and experience in this area.
But this exists largely within the confines of their memberships.
It is not being utilised at scale.
So what should we do?
To be given every chance of success, places need place leaders to be equipped with the skills and support to make the most of what is a very challenging role.
If devolution is to genuinely work, and if power and responsibility is to be put in the hands of people and places, then why would we not look to give them access to the skills and knowledge to help them succeed?
To do this, we should be looking at a platform of support covering five key areas.
This could be provided either on a national or regional/sub-regional basis and should be a dedicated policy initiative overseen by a strong board of business, community and local and national government leaders.
It should link into the heart of Whitehall so that the various departments have their finger on the pulse of what is needed in these places and can craft policy to reflect this.
It will, of course, require funding too.
Just as there are funds available to deliver projects, so there needs to be a funding stream to support the people and leadership capability needed to make those projects successful.
This would cover the following:
1. Capability Assessment & Leadership Development
Helping places understand their existing place leadership strengths and gaps, with structured training for principal and distributed leaders.
2. Best Practice & Peer Learning
Connecting place leaders from different places to share knowledge and practical experiences, helping to provide ideas, insight and fast-track delivery.
3. Practical Tools, Data and Evidence
Providing place data and diagnostic tools, case studies and frameworks to help place leaders understand how their place is performing and practical mechanisms to bring about change.
4. Expert Support
Providing access to experienced practitioners to mentor, guide and share practical experience to help overcome challenges.
5. Bespoke Town Task Forces
Helping places set up their own effective multidisciplinary town task forces or partnerships, with structures covering governance, operating models, roles and responsibilities and, crucially, mechanisms to deliver key actions.
We wouldn’t be starting from scratch with this.
Much of the above exists in one form or another across many people and organisations. It is, however, siloed and untapped at scale.
It needs to be pulled together into a national programme, one that could be accessed by a single town through to city regions.
There should be no bar to entry other than the ability of a place and its leaders to demonstrate true intent to transform their place.
Above all, it must be about skills transfer – adding value to places that won’t be lost once the programme is over as these people grow their own place expertise.
The starting point in all of this is to set the policy direction.
The recognition of the importance of place leadership needs to be elevated to that of other place policy initiatives.
We shouldn’t be asking only:
“What does this town need?”
We should also be asking:
“Who is going to lead the change, and have we equipped them to do it?”
This would be an expression of true devolution in its purest sense.
After all, a place will only be as good as the quality of its leaders, no matter how many tools are provided.
