Market Towns: The Next Ten Years (Updated)

Chris Wade, Chief Executive, Action for Market Towns

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Back in the autumn of 2007, whilst signs of the impending credit crunch, fuel price increases and climate change were evident to some, they were not issues that were in common parlance and the impacts had not begun to be widely felt. At that time, the analysis of issues facing small towns identified three broad sets of policy issues:

Looking Beyond the High Street
Whilst the health of the High Street was recognised as a very visible issue in small towns, it was equally understood that their economic and social well-being was dependent on wider issues such as employment, housing, education, health and transport. Similarly, whilst it was recognised that influences such as climate change and global economics would inevitably have an impact, it was understood that it was important for policy makers to be proactive in mitigating change.

Joined-up Settlements and Policies
By 2007, an understanding had emerged that strategies for regenerating individual small towns could not be developed without a better appreciation of how these towns both complement and compete with their neighbours. Equally, wider regeneration strategies and policies needed to take account of any ripple effects such as, for example, the inadvertent impacts of strong urban-focused economic development and housing strategies on smaller rural towns. One inference was that spatial theories and policy needed to be updated to provide a better understanding of different types of small towns and reflect increased mobility and a global economy.

Community Leadership and Capacity
There was a strong emphasis on the potential of a new localism expressed in modified forms of community leadership and action planning. It was considered important to capture the lessons learnt from a decade of community-led regeneration within market towns to help improve upon the existing good practice. Suggestions for increasing capacity and effectiveness included improved leadership skills, new models of local governance and techniques for achieving greater strategic influence.

The last two years have been dramatic in awakening people to the realities of what previously had seemed like scare mongering about future scenarios for small towns. First there were rapid fuel price rises that made everyone think about fuel dependency and highlighted opportunities and threats for rural livelihoods. This at a time when increasing evidence of impending climate change raised similar issues from a different perspective. Then came the global credit crunch and recession with immediate and visible impacts on the United Kingdom and small town High Streets in particular.

Ongoing Work and Responses to Changing Circumstances
AMT’s work over the last two years has continued to balance long-term research and strategic influence, with the ongoing transfer of knowledge and good practice between its members. The launch at its 2008 Convention of its £2million National Lottery-funded Towns Alive programme has provided extra resources to achieve this. In a sense, the impacts of the recession and threats of climate change demonstrate the validity of such a twin-track approach.

Knowledge Hub
As part of its work, AMT seeks to serve as a knowledge hub for transferring existing knowledge, informing policy and commissioning research. It seeks to do this through a network of Policy Advocates and a national Market Towns Policy Forum called ‘Small Towns for Tomorrow’ involving key agencies, businesses and academic institutions.

Work recently commissioned by AMT as part of this role, shows that there are 1,607 small towns or service centres in England alone. Although individually these towns might appear insignificant in national policy terms (over 80% have a population of less than 10,000), collectively they serve 11.1 million people or over one fifth of the population. Moreover, the work showed that these are some of the fastest growing settlements; with growth rates for small towns being well over twice as fast as larger towns and cities.

The figures in this work by John Shepherd emphasise a dichotomy for regional and national policy makers: How to develop strategies that respond to the individual characteristics and needs of small towns; whilst nurturing their collective potential to contribute to the wider economy and society.

Understanding Different Types of Towns
Usefully, John Shepherd’s work offers some help with this dichotomy by providing a typology of eight groups of small towns that share common social and economic characteristics. These different groupings can then be used in formulating responsive economic and social policy and comparing activity between similar towns. In this respect this work shares similarities with ongoing research by the University of Lincoln and AMT is now working with both institutions to develop a definitive approach to classifying small towns.

Developing Community-Led Planning
Community-led planning has been a widely-used technique for identifying local issues and responses within small towns but it is not delivering its wider potential. Over the last year, AMT has been working in partnership with NALC, ACRE, Carnegie UK and the Urban Forum to develop a coordinated approach to improving community-led planning techniques and widening its strategic influence. Research about to be published by AMT, supports calls for the approach to be developed so that it can provide policy-makers with usable data about the individual and collective needs of towns. AMT is managing an Empowerment Fund contract with CLG, to test how community-led planning can fit better with local authority strategic planning. Two of the first areas that AMT is seeking to test the wider application of community-led planning are in influencing rural service provision and reducing community carbon footprints.

Towns-4-Towns
Through its Towns-4-Towns good practice exchange, AMT seeks to help towns across the country to learn from each other’s experiences. This is achieved through the National Market Towns Awards; a knowledge transfer fund; a database of case studies, local network events and online forums.

Market Towns Academy
AMT is providing training and guidance on sustaining successful local regeneration initiatives through its newly launched Market Towns Academy. This provides an online diagnostic tool to help town partnerships and councils assess progress and an accredited development programme for face-to-face training and online tuition.

Prosperous Places Campaign
Prosperous Places is one of four key campaigns that AMT has been working on over the last two years. The other campaign areas where AMT is focusing its current work to improve the vitality and viability of small towns are community-led planning; rural services and housing. These campaigns draw together particular strands of AMT’s work around a key issue.

In a sense, market towns have been battling with their own ‘mini-recessions’ for a decade or more. The Prosperous Places campaign provides a focus for pulling together this existing experience; understanding the further impacts of a global recession and developing practical and policy responses.

Prosperous Places resources are accessible from the campaign section of the AMT website and include a special Policy in to Practice paper providing guidance on how towns can develop an economic development strategy and bringing together a range of tools, case studies and policy links. One of the key conclusions from this paper was about the important role that town-based action plans and economic strategies will have in informing county and unitary economic assessments from 2010.

Related policy work includes AMT’s position statement on retail and town centres which emphasises the importance of siting new supermarkets and retail parks close to existing High Street shops. AMT attended the Government’s Town Centre Summit with Ministers in April and has submitted detailed proposals that it is now discussing with officials at CLG. Through the network of Advocates, consultation is being conducted on the Government’s new Planning Policy Statement on Planning Prosperous Economies.

Through amt-i, Action for Market Towns’ research and consultancy division, small towns across the country can participate in a national benchmarking scheme to assess their economic vitality and compare year-on-year progress. amt-i also offers a series of town centre services aimed at providing additional support to help towns respond to the recession. amt-i can also draw-on AMT’s network of members to undertake strategic research on economic issues such as inward investment. amt-i is currently undertaking a detailed research programme in conjunction with CLES and the Commission for Rural Communities to assess the impacts of the recession on markets towns and identify transferable good practice in responding to it.

Resilience to the Recession
The ongoing research being conducted by AMT and CLES in to the resilience of market towns to the recession, reports the following findings based on the perceptions of AMT members:

• 61% said unemployment had increased
• 40% said business start-ups had decreased
• 59% said number of vacant business units had increased
• 60% were confident about their town’s future and 30% were unsure or did not respond

Initial conclusions drawn from analysis of the full survey include:

Future Support Requirements:

• Maintenance and increase in funding and support from RDAs and local authorities
• Greater cooperation and responsiveness from landlords
• Reduction in business rates
• Planning protection from out-of-town shopping centres
• Improved local infrastructure including transport links
• Devolving of power and resources including reforms to local governance

General Conclusions:

• Short-term, reactive nature of proposed responses
• Focus limited to town centre and retail
• Role of public economy and not understood
• Potential of third sector not recognized
• Urban-focused and area-wide economic strategies do not engage small towns

Despite the apparent optimism in-part indicated in this research, the findings also reveal some possible shortcomings in the level of capacity, understanding and resources at the town level. Coupled with a seeming lack of focus at the strategic level on the collective economic value of small towns or differentiation between types of towns, the future vitality of the economy seems dependent on local initiative and the inherent qualities of the town environment.

The case remains that whilst examples of successful initiatives exist that can bring together the necessary mix of factors to realize a town’s potential; it is doubtful whether most market towns possess the capacity and capability to proactively influence the wider agendas.

The economies of some market towns will undoubtedly thrive because of inherent strengths including location and transport links. The inevitable long-term decline of others may, however, have been masked by relatively high levels of public and private investment in recent years. Equally, some towns may be well-placed to benefit from the expansion of the green economy by virtue of their abundant natural resources, local enterprise and accessibility; others may find themselves constrained by rising energy costs. We need now a more sophisticated understanding of the potential of different types of small towns to contribute to the wider economy and the necessary local capacity to ensure this potential is realised.