Promised changes to boost the North East’s struggling high streets are coming slower than expected, the region’s mayor has admitted, writes Local Democracy Reporter, Daniel Holland.
Kim McGuinness said on Tuesday that a plan to revive rundown shopping areas “has not moved as quickly as I would have liked or other people would have liked”.
The Labour mayor pledged in her 2024 election manifesto to establish a high streets commission that would devise solutions to breathe new life into towns and villages, with the panel of experts meeting for the first time last November.
She has now told councillors that it had not led to change as quickly as had been hoped, but that she was “more interested in getting in right than getting quick wins or low-hanging fruit”.
Ms McGuinness highlighted the relocation of South Tyneside College to a new campus in South Shields town centre as the “kind of big thinking we want” to deliver lasting improvements that will make high streets more vibrant places, rather than “slapdash solutions”.
The mayor said she had told the commission to “think bigger” and that it would likely mean focusing on making larger interventions in a smaller number of locations, none of which have been confirmed other than South Shields.
Ms McGuinness told the North East mayoral authority’s overview and scrutiny committee: “We could have gone to a couple of run-down places and put a bit of investment into a couple of shops or looked at street furniture and all those things. But I think we have seen that all done before by various rounds of central government funding for high streets that have not really scratched the surface.”
Responding to questions from Newcastle Green Party leader Nick Hartley, she added: “I make no apology for the fact it has not been fast and loose. I would rather it was done properly and that we get it right over a period of time.”
Durham Reform councillor John Cook, the committee’s chair, highlighted concerns about empty and derelict buildings in Stanley and called for local leaders to be given “better powers” to purchase and regenerate problem properties.
He said there was frustration that “we [Durham County Council] don’t own the town centre in the way residents think we do”.
The mayor attacked absentee landlords for “rinsing local businesses, leaving precincts empty, unkempt, unloved, insecure and unsafe”, calling for the introduction of compulsory sale orders that could force property owners to “sell shops that they are not looking after”.
Ms McGuinness added: “The idea that some of these shopping precincts are left to go to wrack and ruin by people who have properly never even been there… slowly devaluing and devaluing them, so that the public get no benefit out of them, presumably so eventually they can sell the land for something else. That is not how we care for our local areas and it is absolutely maddening.”
Daniel Holland
Reporter for the Local Democracy Reporter Service.
South West Durham News covering news across County Durham.
