At the People & Places Partnership, we pride ourselves on finding solutions to pressing problems identified by stakeholders. So great to have residents’ common calls for diversifying town centre retail, business and services, so neatly addressed in this new guide to Tackling High Street Vacancy, published as a last act of the High Streets Task Force.
As its author, Iain Nicholson MIPM, founder of The Vacant Shops Academy, explains in his accompanying blog on teamwork tackling empty shops, the guidance is based on a twin-track approach:
- tackling vacancy is more than ‘just an agents-landlords thing’ and that a ‘place partnership’ can help get the job done quicker and more sustainably.
- while traditional uses still have a part to play, you can now look to a much longer list of go-to options to fill those empties including arts & crafts, leisure, education and health.
The approach that the guide describes follows four clear steps:
- Audit: Survey the location logging all the vacant units and ask: “what’s missing?”
- Engage: Speak with agents and landlords to understand the status of individual, empty units and check their back story to understand the prospects for letting and help build a ‘target list’ of empty & available units.
- Encourage: Seek to persuade would-be occupiers to take an interest in your place and suggest agents and landlords try new approaches including meanwhile use or a different type of occupier.
- Promote: Work with partners to promote the place, the opportunities and your progress, including details of available units on a single platform.
The new guide offers encouraging snippets of success, including ongoing work in Aberdeen that reported a 25% vacancy rate on its main street, Union Street, and to-date has halved the number of empty units.
