10 July 2012 : Column 185

the Maypole, the Empress, the Cambridge Blue, St Radegund and the Devonshire Arms. Over the last three years, however, more than 20 pubs have closed in Cambridge. This is replicated nationally, with 12 pubs closing every week. This is not simply some cold fact of life that our constituents should have to accept and deal with.

Many of these pubs are profitable. The Flying Pig, near Cambridge station is immensely popular and is doing better every year, especially since becoming a free house. Built in 1832, it was one of the first buildings on Hills road, but it is threatened with demolition to be turned into flats. In my old ward of East Chesterton, the Green Dragon is now the only trading pub. The local Penny Ferry, Dog and Pheasant and Haymakers are all boarded up, and local councillors struggle to find planning grounds to protect them.

Rural pubs face similar threats. When the only pub in a village closes, that is a huge blow for the residents there, as well as posing a risk in respect of drink-driving. Pubs are, ultimately, a responsible place to drink: landlords can control excessive drinking, and rural pubs can quite literally keep whole villages on the map. Pubs are valuable economically, too—each pub injects an average of £80,000 into a local economy, and pubs in Cambridge alone employ just under 1,500 people, many of them young—as well as promoting the intangible “well-being” that local councillors must be able to protect. So pubs provide a valuable service to local communities, beyond just the purely economic. The Government’s national planning policy framework recognised that fact, but still more is needed. We should help local people to protect their pubs.

Much the same is true when it comes to independent local shops and the high streets they create. Nationally, 12,000 local shops closed in 2009. On every high street across the country, we can see many of exactly the same shops—chains of coffee shops, clothes shops, betting shops. Now chains have many advantages—economies of scale, for example—and they can afford better lawyers and get cheaper rent. There is nothing wrong with having some of them. If there are too many, however, our high streets become identikit clones of each other. We lose the variety that makes our towns and cities special and different from each other. Our shopping options become ever blander and the range of options available diminishes more and more, as we see the demise of the specialist, the different, the quirky.

Some high streets have already succumbed, and could be anywhere in the country. Others fight on: Bridge street and Mill road in Cambridge are good examples, well worth visiting. They work together to look after their areas, and have strong local groups to help each other; but across the country, the traffic is largely one way. Independent shops turn into chains, but they rarely go back the other way. This has economic effects, as well. The proliferation of chain shops is often a false economy for local residents. At their worst, they can temporarily sell below cost to force independents to close, but when they are the only shop in town, prices can go back up again. More of the takings get sucked away from local people. A 2009 report by the New Economics Foundation found that twice as much money is kept in a local community if people buy locally than if they buy from a chain.