Understanding Your Town Centre

Caernarfon and its car parks is one of the most recent towns to be ‘benchmarked’ by People and Places.

The Town Benchmarking System continues to grow and evolve. Since small beginnings in the East Midlands over a decade ago, this innovative system measuring town and city performance on 12 Key Performance Indicators has now been used and conducted in over 300 localities in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Benchmarkers either purchase a license for £350 a year and send their data to People and Places to turn into a Report or commission us to conduct the work. The latter option has seen myself and Chris on Planes, Trains, Buses and an array of different Automobiles traversing the Shires of Great Britain and lush green lands of Ireland, from training groups in West Devon to presenting the report and subsequent action plans to business forums in the Lake District. I have been woken by 3.30am alarm calls to conduct footfall counts in Northumberland to nearly getting arrested as a suspected car thief in the aptly named Fleet during a Parking Audit!!!

At People and Places we now have 6 years worth of data providing a conclusive evidence base on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to our towns on a National, Regional and Typology level, equating to something close to utopia for a Human Geographer like myself. The 2014 data from Benchmarked towns highlighted general information such as;

National Small Towns (under 250 commercial units) are still largely independent with
69% of A1 Shops being unique to the town in which they are based.

Positive information such as;

Lower Vacancy Rates; Vacancy rates are half the GB average at 7% and a 1% reduction from 2013.
Higher Footfall; Footfall on a Market Day and Non Market Day has increased from 2013. 134 persons per ten minutes is the current National average on a Market Day compared to 122 in 2013, whilst on a Non Market Day the figure has risen from 90 to 98 personas.

Room for improvement such as;

Car Parking Issues; Car parking vacancy rates on a Non Market Day are 37% noticeably higher than the optimum level of 15%. 50% of Businesses reported car parking as a negative aspect of the town centre.
Retail Offer; 41% of town centre users wished to see an improvement in the Retail Offer.

The level for analysis is never ending but for me the real essence of Benchmarking is that the data provides the ingredients to ensure you create the perfect social, economic and retail mix for your localities. As one of the legions of people whose partner is obsessed by the work of Berry and Hollywood, we all know that making a cake without understanding the recipe is disastrous. Benchmarking is much more than the icing it is the layers on which the final touches are based.

By Mike King, Director, People and Places Partnership