Comment: Portas Pilot towns are not making much advance

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Amid the furore over the horsemeat scandal, it was easy to lose sight of the progress, or lack thereof, of the Portas Pilot towns.

A nifty use of the Freedom of Information act by 25 Ten Boutique owner Paul Turner-Mitchell revealed that the 12 pilot towns had only spent 12% of their allocated budget so far, with the highlights including Dartford spending £1,600 on someone to walk around dressed as Peppa Pig and Wolverhampton clocking up nearly a grand on postage.

To be fair, the local authorities came up with some decent responses, not least remarking that it wasn’t a spending contest but a question of sensibly galvanising local communities to get behind the cause.

I can see both sides of the ongoing discussion over the pilots: they are welcome, but combining what is essentially Government policy with a TV entertainment endeavour is unlikely to end satisfactorily.

I spoke recently at the High Street Futures event, organised by the University of Southampton, which brought together bigmouths like me with people from property, planning and town centre management to discuss what the high street actually needs.

I learnt some fascinating things (such as that a typical local authority has more staff to manage trees than to manage town centres) and it became clear that the needs of the UK’s high streets would be best served through a combination of local and national policies to correct a number of market distortions and imbalances.

A more sympathetic rates regime; financial enablement from banks and the Government; an end to short-sighted parking banditry; a level playing field in terms of corporation tax and VAT; and effective town centre management to drive footfall and dwell time would all be hugely helpful.

The measure that would really save the high street, though, would be shoppers putting their money where their mouth is and shopping there. Good luck with that…