Save the High Street: Starrers Plan, gefälschte Friseur-, Wetten- und Vape -Läden zu blockieren
https://news.sky.com/story/pm-to-announce-pride-in-place-programme-with-funding-for-330-areas-13437501
Von topotaul
Save the High Street: Starrers Plan, gefälschte Friseur-, Wetten- und Vape -Läden zu blockieren
https://news.sky.com/story/pm-to-announce-pride-in-place-programme-with-funding-for-330-areas-13437501
Von topotaul
36 Kommentare
How about enforcing money laundering checks and close down the fronts? Pretty sure a lot of these places wouldn’t stand up to detailed scrutiny, but not sure any existing bodies have the time money or inclination to do that.
While this sounds like a good idea, the way it appears they are implementing it will fail. There’s a severely deprived area near me that has been given all sorts of regeneration funds but it’s still an absolute mess. The reason appears to be that just allocating funds is worthless if the people running the councils have no clue what to do with the funds.
The council running the deprived area near me spends funding on the most ridiculous projects that are wildly overpriced and have zero impact on the community, meanwhile the high street and crime get worse and worse.
The only way to make Starmer’s idea work is to not blindly give cash, but to allocate the money to real experts who can swoop in and dictate how that money is spent on proper projects that have real impact. Just giving cash to local councils will end in failure.
Are vape shops and fake shops worse than boarded up shops?
Nothing about how they will encourage new businesses into those units. A better use of the money would be to scrap businesses rates on the units and subsidising the rent by 50% for five years to get new and existing businesses into the units.
Money laundering, criminal activity. These shops are the ‘in your face’ side of everything that is wrong with the country. It is brazen.
Don’t forget about the snaggle-toothed scagheads roaming around town centres begging for change. Ban them too.
so we will go from having some shops in these lots to none at all.
Sure it’s not ideal the current situation but i’m not convinced that if you block these establishments traditional ones will come back
Can’t have an article about a new Labour policy without a huge photo of Farage now can we.
Block those shops but also do we really think the high street is worth saving? Is It that much of a cornerstone of society?
I hope he doesn’t miss American Candy Stores when rolling that plan out.
Waste of time and money. Highstreets are collapsing for 3 basic reasons
1. Online shopping, especially Amazon. It is easier to use, doesn’t have parking issues, and dodges taxes on an epic scale.
2. Cost of utilities, especially electricity. If Labour were serious about government, fixing the rigged energy market would have been a day one priority with daily working groups.
3. Dematerialisation. Many products that we relied on in previous decades have been digitised. Cameras, CDs, DVDs, gift cards, and much more.
We are returning to a pre-high street model where people buy food necessities in person, but order in luxuries or sometimes visit a specialist shop. It is really sad for me, as I’m a 90s Mall die hard. Still take my kids to the Mall to HMV, get an ice cream, explore the cookery/gaming shops.
gambling should be regulated out of high-street into more designated areas.
vape shops – closed altogether and selling vapes should fall under the same regulation as selling cigarettes
barbers… idk – how can you prohibit a barber?
Fake ones, sure. Those that have creative accounting – OK, deal with that. But mostly these places exist because they make money. You need a couple of people and minimal supplies, just some clippers, scissors, boxes of vapes and people do get haircuts and chain vape. Real betting shops seems to be a way of getting round restrictions on the numbers of those fruit machines that people pump money into, they can get in the bin. So what would we be left with after that?
There was a lovely little Café close to me that made the local news when it’s Energy Bill went from £900 each quarter to over £4000. They couldn’t sustain it and the business closed. Lovely lady and her staff all out of work. A real loss to the Community
This looks like a bribe, a bribe which won’t work. Labour has to deal with the migration issue effectively. One in one out isn’t going to work. They have to show that they have migration under control. A few million here and there over 10 years isn’t going to solve anything.
(a) How do you know if a barber shop is „fake“ before it opens?
(b) More fundamentally, the high street tends to be abandoned in poor communities. That means there’s a narrow range of businesses which are sustainable based on the trade they will attract from the community. Opening an artisanal deli or vintage clothes shop in a place where most people are struggling to afford the weekly food shop won’t help.
(c) Clever move to put Clacton on the shitholes list. If they do a big event with lots of fanfare, they may actually force Farage to visit his own seat or embarrass him by forcing him to miss an important local occasion.
When small business can’t make profit you know something is broken; the large companies can lobby and suckle the politicians to get tax breaks, most large companies pay scant tax into the system.
Small business is the backbone of the UK, pays the majority of tax and that back has been given several slipped discs via energy costs, business rates and cost of living crisis.
The current system only rewards large business and therefore increases the likelihood of further inequality. That’s the challenge space unfortunately and sadly i can see zero change on the horizon.
We cosy up to multi-nationals/ private finance initiatives we endorse rampant money transfer to the few and lock out small business. We are wholesale adopting AI which will only reduce job opportunities.
We tax small business at the same rates as multi nationals if they make a reasonable take. You have to break the current status in order to change any of this.
We’re on a trajectory where the people of the country will just be locked in their home with no quality of life or disposable income. For what? So US companies can bleed us dry. Who consumes fuelling tax revenue when there’s no one left with money?
You have to upset someone to change this; i’d pick big business over small business and certainly the people over any corporate identities.
They need to look into the construction companies that redo the interiors of all these places. I’m sure there’s some dodgy stuff going on there.
Not to mention how *quickly* it gets done compared to renovations for legitimate businesses. Never seen such efficiency in my entire life.
I haven’t read the article but I can’t see a high street resurgence happening. The cost of operating in physical locations isn’t viable – it’s just simply more profitable to invest in an online marketplace in 2025. There aren’t many businesses that physically require a high street presence.
>**Sir Keir Starmer is to announce a „Pride in Place“ programme with funding for over 330 disadvantaged communities as part of a fightback against Reform UK.**
Reform is actually the best thing to ever happen to the UK. It’s forced the current government to actually get things *done*. Reform won’t even need to win the next election at this rate.
Town centre parking needs to be free.
Town centres lose out to online shopping (mo parking costs), but also to other retail locations where shops have free car parks attached.
There’s a cost to making parking free obviously, and it would need to be paid by taxpayers. But it would significantly boost town centre traffic.
What will save the high street is having 75% of the buildings on smaller high streets own by the council or community somehow and having business rates/rents for those businesses really low for 3 years after which they start paying rent.
High street bookies have already taken heavy hits over the past decade or more. I don’t have figures but I would wager their shop numbers have come way down from the possible peak of the late 00s (when they were opening up cupboard shops anywhere and everywhere to get around the 4 FOBT limit rules)
E.g Coral and Ladbrokes merging several years ago resulted in a large number of shops shutting down.
Betting shops require quite a bit of red tape hoops to jump through in order to open, also. Has anyone seen obvious fronts under the guise of being betting shops?
The high street is dying because people are broke. High streets in nice areas are doing fine because people have money to spend in them.
Maybe we need to stop trying to save the high street. If there were a demand for it, this situation wouldn’t exist to begin with.
My theory is that we have an abundances of fake businesses like this (vape shops, Turkish barbers, ‚American candy‘ shops) because we simply don’t live in the „real world“ anymore. People spend more and more of their life online. People shop online, they socialise online, they rarely have a reason to leave the house except to go to work. And when people *do* shop in ‚meat space‘, they go to the supermarket.
So we have a lot of retail space that is, practically speaking, superfluous. Supply is outstripping demand. So the void these once-bustling high streets leave is filled by fake businesses.
We have an oversupply of retail space and an undersupply of housing. The obvious solution here is to replace failing high streets with apartments.
High street stores cannot compete with online shopping. If he wanted to help he’d give them an advantage to help them compete, lower VAT for goods sold through shops on designated ‚high streets‘, lower national insurance contributions for high street employees up to a certain amount, rates under a certain amount of profit.
The government wouldn’t lose out, whatever revenue is lost in taxation is gained by the increased employment and related taxes.
After a sudden boom (and bust) in ‚American Candy‘ shops, the latest big one in my city is phone case shops. Loads of them have suddenly popped up, seem to be open nearly all hours, but never have customers.
Close out of town retail parks redevelop town centres and remove parking charges, provide funding to improve pedestrianisation of town high streets. Make banks open on weekends. Reduce and enforce lower business rates to encourage growth, build houses on the old retail parks where appropriate and move huge supermarkets out of small towns killing footfall to the independents.
I wonder how they’ll work reform into this article.
> Communities will get new powers to revive neglected high streets in a move Labour insiders **hope will give the party a boost against Reform UK.**
There we go. So anything anyone does now that’s perceived as positive is a fight against Reform and anything they do that’s unpopular is helping Reform, got it.
Too late: the absurd lockdowns killed the high street five years ago.
I do wonder whether it would be better instead of spending on big regeneration projects, just buy up retail units and rent them to local businesses for half of market rates.
Convert empty high street shops into short term housing for local authorities to use for emergency housing.
The owners can be compensated by shifting the council tax onto the new residents.
We need to stop trying to save it.
Some key services will need to exist but the town centre as we knew it 10 – 60 years ago is dead.
Talk about trying to flog a dead horse!
If you want to save the high Street, make parking free. I’m already taking time out my day to go to the high Street, I have to pay for parking, worry I either won’t make it back to the car in time or be charged more. Alternatively I can order the item to my door at no extra cost of money or time.
Make parking free, people and businesses will follow.
Just giving them money is not going to solve this . High streets are dying because of many many things . Online access , parking fees , rent costs for shops , staffing costs , lack of parking in some cases ext . The money needs to be used to make it more affordable for shops or more affordable for potential customers to go to the high streets
The fake shops or money laundering shops are the only ones who really seem to get anything out of the high streets atm
Yeah not the problem, stupid rent rates based on 90s footfall and the internet not existing and high petty crime make opening a storefront a terrible choice
What about candy shops? Because what you see in central London is not normal