Now that the dust has settled on the Budget, NPPF and Government’s response to the Portas Town Centre review, we know two things for certain about the future of our High Streets. Firstly, Government gives the appearance of not really understanding (and possibly not really caring about) the impact of what it is doing. Therefore, and secondly, the responsibility for future town centre vitality will depend almost entirely on the vigour and rigour of local leadership teams.
Government’s response to the Portas Review is both extraordinary in its thoughtlessness, brazen in its abdication of responsibility to local teams (and local authorities in particular), and concurrently provides a ‘signature’ exemplar of how they pursue permissive ‘Localism’ (as opposed to the heavily ‘guided’ variant) in practice.
