North Wales MS Mark Isherwood has challenged the Deputy Minister for Housing and Local Government over investment in town centres, emphasising calls by FSB Cymru - the Federation of Small Businesses – for “a new approach for our high streets”.
Responding to the Statement by the Deputy Minister on ‘Town Centres – Securing their Future’, Mr Isherwood referred to the fact that small towns in Wales account for almost 40% of the whole population of the country and that five of the ten most deprived areas in Wales are located within towns, including Rhyl, Wrexham and Merthyr Tydfil.
He questioned the Deputy Minister over Welsh Government investment in town centres, and measures that have been taken to ensure that communities have an input on decisions that are taken.
He said:
“A Welsh Conservative Government would establish a £200 million Seaside Town Fund and a Market Town Fund to help regenerate Wales’ local communities, which would help ‘level-up’ investment across Wales and enable communities to decide how the fund is to be invested within their local area.
“How, therefore, do you respond to the statement by FSB Cymru - the Federation of Small Businesses - that ’we need a new approach for our high streets... including publishing town strategies in every town; ensuring the ownership is local and businesses and the voluntary and public sectors are engaged; establishing a property register where interventions often fail with absent or unidentifiable landlords, to build a basis for engagement; and rethinking the role of business rates in towns, replicating the English relief for high street businesses?”
He added:
“The UK Government has announced £3.6 billion for its Town Fund to support towns across England.
“Although most of this funding came from UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government departmental spending for England, which did not therefore generate additional Barnett consequential funding for the Welsh Government, all of the funding for the Towns Fund in England is drawn from pots that will generate funding for the Welsh Government.
“Given that the Welsh Government will therefore make its own decisions on how to spend this, will you be spending at least an equivalent sum on transforming towns in Wales?
He added:
“You state today that ‘community engagement and empowerment is central to’ identifying and prioritising actions that will bolster our town centres, and that the Ministerial Town Centre Action Group will be prioritising this.
“When I questioned you about this in January, referring to the extensive work carried out by the Carnegie Trust on the enabling state and 'Turnaround Towns' - which found that ‘the future of our towns is about more than just the high street, it is also about residents' access to levers of change and their ability to influence local decisions’ and that communities ‘are best-placed to bring a wealth of local knowledge and collective energy to the decisions that affect them' - you replied:
“One of the things we are doing as part of this package is looking in terms of how we can take forward more of a communications approach with communities, to work with them, to actually talk about the support that we're talking about and get their input”.
“What concrete measures have you therefore put in place since then to make this happen?”
Mr Isherwood also asked the Deputy Minister to respond to the call by RNIB Cymru and Guide Dogs Cymru for the Welsh Government to “to ensure that people with sight loss and other disabled people are not unfairly disadvantaged by changes to the built environment, or any other measures taken in response to coronavirus”, and questioned her over support for Business Improvement Districts in Wales.