When our day-to-day work is focused on understanding and addressing the issues affecting town centres, it comes as a surprise that evidence is not driving change in every community.
As the review of People and Places’ approach to ‘Understanding Town Centre Trends’ published on the Government’s Great British High Street web site states, the premise for our work is that “improving your town centre without first investigating the issues, is like baking a cake without knowing the ingredients”.
So when we recently undertook a survey of 11 towns in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire to see how performance monitoring is used to inform town centre improvements, the findings came as a surprise. When asked if town centre performance monitoring is undertaken, six of the 11 towns responded that it is. Of these only four responded that data is routinely collected.
When asked about current priorities, it is as first surprising that there were clear responses for all towns despite an apparent dearth of data on the nature of issues. Respondents gave a range of answers that can be broadly divided in to commercial (vacancies; footfall; retail mix; marketing) and physical issues (traffic and transport; new development; environment).
Disappointing in some ways that the seemingly limited use of data to drive change might be, these responses also highlight the pressures that local authorities are under to resource and respond to a wide range of issues. As specialists committed to the evidenced-based revitalisation of town centres, we need to continue to raise awareness about the simple survey tools available. That is the value of objective evidence –it makes you think!
For more details of the survey findings contact Chris Wade via chris.wade@people-places.net
