Listen to the high streets and they’ll tell you what must be done

Count the coffee haunts and boutique clothes shops, or the vape dives and shuttered charity outlets with plywood curtains. Watch the people - are they bustling, hustling, or shuffling and coughing?

High streets are where the abstract language of economics becomes visible and they represent the lived experience of growth or, too often, the lack of it. Whether your high street is the beating heart of the town or sclerotic scar tissue, it is important both in its function and its symbolism.

And so Labour’s renewed focus on high streets, ahead of this month’s Gorton and Denton by-election, certainly makes political sense. Labour’s candidate, Angeliki Stogia, is a product of pre-Brexit Britain, a Greek who studied in Manchester in the 90s, liked it and stayed, becoming a naturalised citizen, then a councillor for Whalley Range, which she has represented since 2012. Her background in transport, environment and regeneration policy means she’ll be on familiar territory talking about the decline of the high street.

While the government’s focus may be elsewhere this week, Labour is expected to put high street revival at the centre of its campaign, with £150m of targeted funding for struggling areas, alongside the broader £5bn Pride in Place programme announced last year. As well as money, ministers are talking seriously about compulsory purchase powers to bring derelict buildings back into use.

All of this is welcome and desperately needed. But it is also worth being honest about what high street decline actually represents. Because empty shops are not the problem – they are the symptom. Over the past 15 years, Britain’s high streets have been battered by forces far beyond the control of local councils and individual traders. Austerity hollowed out local government and squeezed household incomes. The pandemic accelerated long-term shifts towards online shopping and away from alcohol-led socialising. Rents remained stubbornly high even as footfall fell. And the wider economy has wheezed, with productivity and wage growth failing to recover.

Brexit has compounded that malaise. By erecting new barriers to trade with our largest market, it has shaved GDP, reduced investment and narrowed margins for small businesses already operating on the edge. High streets populated with marginally profitable firms were always going to feel that shock hard.

Best for Britain’s Decoding Populism research shows why this matters politically. Places where people feel financially disappointed or insecure are significantly more likely to turn away from established parties and towards insurgent alternatives. A struggling high street is often a reliable indicator of that underlying anxiety, reflecting not just economic difficulty, but a sense that progress has stalled and no one is in control.

This is the context in which Reform UK has found traction. Where shops are boarded up and prospects feel limited, the temptation to vote for something that promises disruption is understandable, even if the promise itself is thin gruel. Despair is not a positive emotion; it is a miserable basis on which to change political allegiance, but it is a legitimate one.

Our politicians are right to take high streets seriously, of course they are. Investment in regeneration, powers to tackle absentee landlords and support for local authorities to shape their own places all matter. They can make a real difference to how a town centre feels and functions.

But there is a risk in pretending that high streets can be fixed purely at a local level. Too often, regeneration schemes are asked to compensate for structural weaknesses they did not create. You can renovate shopfronts and pedestrianise streets, but if businesses cannot turn a profit, any recovery will be fragile. A serious strategy for high streets has to confront the fundamentals, and they are extremely serious challenges.

Speak to the people who own small businesses, and they will tell you about business rates that punish physical presence, employment costs that rise faster than turnover, and planning systems that reward speculation over use. And, above all, an economy that has failed to grow.

For a high street to flourish, the economy around it must be flourishing too. That is not something local government can deliver on its own – it depends on national choices and, indeed, international choices. Any party that is serious about reversing decline rather than managing it must look hard at the UK’s economic relationship with Europe. Closer alignment is not a cultural project or a backward glance. It is a practical route to higher trade volumes, greater investment and a broader tax base. Without growth, there will always be too little money to go around, and too many high streets will continue to compete for scraps.

Reform UK offers no answers here. Nigel Farage cares even less about your local high street than he does about his Clacton constituency, which is a very low bar. Exploiting frustration is easier than fixing its causes. It is also a disturbingly reliable way to make things worse.

So, if you want to know what the future holds for a place, walk its high street. And if you find despair etched in shuttered shops and thinning footfall, political upheaval is always a possibility when agitators are afoot. Addressing that despair requires more than patchwork funding. It requires the courage to tackle the deeper economic failures that put those shutters up in the first place. These are not trivial problems. But listen to the high streets and they’ll tell you what must be done.

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Naomi Smith is the CEO of Best for Britain.

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