Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Emma Brooksbank
About
Yorkshire writer who has lived for forty years near Malton and Norton.
Member of community resistance to edge of town superstore, co-writer of draft Malton and Norton Neighbourhood Plan, co-ordinator for Totally Locally Malton and Norton 2013 and Director of Malton Community Interest Company.
Close involved in inventive community projects to support the towns and their businesses.
Main Submission
Large retail chains like Jessops, Comet and HMV have gone under, not because of poor retail management, but because of internet competition. In small market towns like Malton in North Yorkshire (population, with its sister town Norton, across the river Derwent: 12,250) Massers Camera shop and TVC Electrical (selling TVS, computers and white goods) struggle to compete with on-line sales. Massers have had to concentrate on photography rather than selling cameras. TVC, employing six local people and marketing themselves as “Engineers That Retail”, work extremely hard at the service side of their business: but they must first sell the products for which they provide such good after-sales service.
Schemes such as Totally Locally (www.totally-locally.co.uk) can help small towns like Malton and Norton with a branding and marketing scheme for their small independent shops, fostering collaboration and strong Shop Local messages, such as: “If all the adults in your town spent £5 in their local independent shops which they would otherwise have spent online or in a big supermarket, it would be worth an extra £2.6 million a year to the local economy.”
Malton and Norton shopkeepers innovate where possible to help themselves and the towns and there is a strong emphasis on service to customers. Their Totally Locally scheme is to be launched in the summer of 2013. Malton and Norton town councils are in the process of finalising a Neighbourhood Plan, drafted by a collaboration of traders, councillors and residents and on which the whole community has been consulted. Traders collaborated to play “Maltonopoly”, an innovative scheme for the Sundays leading up to Christmas 2012, a boost to sales which is to be repeated. The towns host events throughout the year from cycle races through the streets to a popular monthly indoor Food Lovers Market; there are History, Literary and Car events as well as a big May two-day Food Lovers Festival which attracts about 20,000 people.
The community is doing all sorts of things to help itself. It deserves—and badly needs—outside help too, from government at various levels, to make the retail “playing field” fairer in relation to the internet and big out of town supermarkets and discount stores.
In recent months, more than 10,000 jobs have been lost across the country in the electrical retail industry alone, which over the past four years has seen 195,000 retail workers lose their jobs and 20,684 stores close. This is unprecedented and a real catastrophe. Small retailers are accused in the media of being “dinosaurs who don’t move with the times.” Certainly there will be some who deserve to go bust. But good retailers don’t become bad retailers overnight. Retailers will sometimes close because of market changes, but what is badly needed is a levelling of that “playing field”.
Could government please address the following:
High business rates: The revaluation of rateable values was last done in 2008 for the period 2010–2015. In 2008 the market was at a significantly higher level than it is now. Why is the expected revaluation not being undertaken this year, for implementation in the period 2015–2020? Since 2008, many landlords have looked at creative ways to manage rents for their business customers. Since the business rates in 2008 were based on high rents, it is not infrequently now the case that annual rateable values are significantly higher than rents, which makes an absolute nonsense.
Some internet sales companies operate offshore, thus avoiding UK tax/VAT and gaining an unfair advantage over high street and small town centre traders. Could the government levy an “internet sales tax” to deal with this tax loophole and to make it fairer?
Could the government introduce an emergency law to ban “loss leaders” used by large supermarkets and out of town discount stores? Loss leaders are often used by supermarkets to entice more customers via non-food lines (CDs, DVDs, small electrical goods etc) in order to boost food sales. It is noted that loss leaders are illegal in France, so there cannot be an EU reason against making them illegal in the UK.
Could the government consider a freeze on the level of Employers’ NI in order to support retail employment?
Could the government direct local councils to offer free parking in high streets and town centres where local retailers/consumers request it? Parking charges were originally introduced to deal with congestion, not as a revenue earner. In Malton Market Place, the business community identified the need for free parking: Malton Community Interest Company has been providing this for several years (at a cost of £12,500 pa in business rates).
The internet, as well as supermarkets and out of town stores, is here to stay. Everyone will always look for commercial advantage. There will always be shoppers who make use of the expertise of the staff in small shops selling books, computers, cameras or whatever, and then go home and do their buying on the internet.
It is essential to ensure that high streets and small town centres are also here to stay: successful town centres with thriving shops are vital for our local communities and to our local economies. Depressed towns are bad for everyone, bringing social unhappiness and all the costs to the taxpayer of redundancy and unemployment.
If it is the responsibility of retailers to change with the times and innovate, it is the responsibility of government to support them by taking what could be relatively simple measures to help level that “playing field”.
5 April 2013