Matt and Ben argue why a new HSTF is needed as much as ever
The Government is right to address the social as well as economic deficit in our town centres, but for investment to be effective, local people need guidance and best practice from experienced practitioners, argue Matt Colledge and Ben Stephenson.
The state of our towns and high streets remains in sharp focus as politicians grapple with the complex issues besetting local centres. How people feel about their high street is often a proxy for how they view the state of the country overall.
In May 2025, Power to Change published a report that linked high street vacancy with growing support for Reform UK, suggesting that a ‘shuttered front’ of 39 Parliamentary constituencies primarily in the Midlands and Northern England could be a key battleground for Labour at the next general election.
Neither capital investment nor community empowerment alone are the silver bullet.
Matt Colledge and Ben Stephenson
Whatever one’s politics, there is growing concern around the sense of disconnection people feel from civic life, exemplified in the perception of decline they see every day on their high streets. And while the term ‘left behind places’ has fallen out of favour, the government sees fixing the problem as a political, economic and social imperative.
This thinking has influenced the Labour government’s Pride in Place programme, which is explicit in its social value objectives of connection, pride and participation in our towns and cities.
While a new round of high street revitalisation funding is always welcome, neither capital investment nor community empowerment alone are the silver bullet they are so often held up to be. For many places the answer can be found in both these things and in everything in between.
Careful curation
Given the complexity of high streets and the people that bring them to life, the government is right not to prescribe a template for place transformation. Not everything works everywhere. Towns and high streets are multifaceted ecosystems that require careful curation and support.
Transformation will therefore only be found through applying a range of approaches, including:
Accurately diagnosing the challenges
Agreeing a compelling, forward-thinking, achievable vision for change
Ensuring partnerships are effective, involving landlords, retailers and businesses alongside the community and public sector
Creating and delivering upon culture, heritage and market strategies; activating spaces and bringing about new uses
Reducing empty units, encouraging meanwhile uses and community ownership
Enhancing place branding and marketing to turn around poor sentiment.
Often many of these workstreams need to happen in tandem, requiring considerable human capacity. It also requires place management expertise and experience to create robust strategies and delivery mechanisms to turn the strategies into actions. In both cases these things are in short supply.
To tackle this deficit we need a new task force to support high street recovery.
Navigating the pitfalls
Matt Colledge speaks about the HSTF on The One Show in 2024
As place practitioners delivering the original High Streets Task Force we saw first hand the disadvantage many places were facing, relying on exhausted community volunteers, politicians with excellent intentions but often little practical experience, and time-poor council officers with too many places to look after.
Add to this the inevitable silos that emerge when intentions do not align – council departments protecting their various regulatory spaces, community groups battling each other for grants, and businesses and developers with an important role in high street revitalisation but left out of the conversation or treated with suspicion.
There is now a pool of practitioners that have navigated these pitfalls before and can save places from having to learn this all from scratch.
A newly designed High Streets Task Force would offer dedicated, tailored, independent and specialist expertise to help places remove the blockers they face and support them to deliver tangible and measurable change.
Utilising a pool of leading place practitioners across a range of specialisms and drawing from leading research and data, direct support should be systematically offered to places to optimise the current funding streams and to ensure communities and town partnerships are equipped to make change happen.
External understanding
We know the success stories and why they work. The evidence is there, and it must be brought to bear.
Matt Colledge and Ben Stephenson
The original High Streets Task Force was run on behalf of the government by the Institute of Place Management and it supported over 160 English towns and cities across five years to do just this.
We believe the decision to ask a leading external place sector organisation with a profound understanding of the needs of places to run the Task Force, as opposed to having it within a government department, was the right one.
Any organisational form that can be as close to the ‘coal face’ of place is likely to be more effective. Furthermore, dedicated support was provided by experts with decades of practical experience in turning places around, and the Task Force helped many high streets make progress. It was also an opportunity to gather vital data on our town centres.
As a result of this, we now know a lot more about what’s going on across the country. We know the success stories and why they work. We know what makes a good local partnership and how to identify a good local leader. We understand, in granular detail, why places decline. The evidence is there, and it must be brought to bear on the ongoing challenge of high street transformation.
Without a programme of practical support, the existing funding, powers and opportunities afforded by devolution will be at best sub-optimal or at worst largely ineffectual.
Core learnings
Core learnings for a HSTF2
Learning from the previous Task Force, any new programme should have at its core:
Specialist expertise. A wide cross section of trained, experienced place practitioners drawing from a range of place specialisms is essential. These could be coordinated either through a national or regional network. The key is the quality of the support, with an emphasis on that support being deployed to enable places to deliver against their objectives.
Continuous support. It is essential that expertise and support is provided for as long as it is needed. This may vary depending upon where places are up to on their transformation journey as well as the unique challenges they face. But experience from the first Task Force showed many places needed more than just a few days of support.
Research-led delivery. Any new task force must be underpinned by leading place research, data, evidence and frameworks. This was a core strength of the original Task Force, and provided a consistent, methodical and robust approach to tackling issues.
Knowledge transfer. The exchange of expertise from those supporting places to the place leaders within them must be an important component of any new initiative. Equipping places to help themselves is key, as is providing a forum for places to learn from each other, thereby avoiding the constant reinvention of the wheel with associated costs and delays that comes with it.
Community buy-in. The original High Streets Task Force relied on existing local power structures for its delivery, meaning that if local councils had limited community relationships, they could not call on a range of representatives to engage in the conversation. A new programme should have the time and space to identify and engage the community leaders before any formal vision development process takes place.
Policy integration. Initiatives across government and beyond are tackling questions around place-based challenges and civic participation, but they are not joined up. The new Civil Society Council, the Health on the High Street agenda, and The National Conversation on community cohesion are all examples of work that could be feeding into the debate. A new High Streets Task Force should include a leadership council that gives it access to strategic conversations across government and beyond.
As work continues on the national High Streets Strategy, which publishes later in 2026, we face a once in a generation opportunity to redesign high streets to meet a broad set of purposes into the future. This task cannot be backwards facing, as conversations about the high street so often are.
Instead, we must use what we have learned to meet the new challenges of place, building resilience and bringing the heart back into our communities.
Continuing the legacy
The High Street Consultancy was formed from a group of place experts who had worked to deliver the government’s original High Streets Task Force between 2019 and 2024. With the intention of continuing the legacy of that programme, the consultancy focuses on developing effective partnerships, evidence-based place management and community participation as precursors to high street transformation.
