As the government commits £301 million to High Street Innovation Partnerships and prepares to launch a new High Street Strategy this summer, we’re pleased to share our learning about high streets as civic places and spaces.
A year of learning through our Community-Led High Street Innovators demonstrator shows how community businesses are already unlocking a different kind of high street renewal – one focused not simply on retail, but on a mixed-use civic model that is more locally rooted, more trusted, and more durable than top-down approaches alone.
Today, we’ve published our latest report, The new high street playbook: Community-led innovation in action, detailing our learning and six policy recommendations. The report deepens our understanding of the role community businesses can play in high street renewal, and the barriers that stand in their way.
Communities are already leading change
Our Innovators demonstrate that the high street can be a place of care, learning, enterprise, connection and everyday participation. Communities don’t lack ambition, ideas or energy for their high streets and town centres. Yet community-led regeneration too often stalls because the wider system makes local stewardship hard to achieve and sustain.
What happens on our high streets is shaped by who owns them, who governs them, and who gets to make decisions about them. Across the Innovators’ work in Birkenhead, Bristol, Dewsbury and Stockport the same systemic barriers to community power on the high street keep recurring. These barriers will be familiar to community businesses across the country: fragmented ownership, poor access to vacancy and ownership data, weak routes from meanwhile use to longer-term control, thin council capacity, and funding that is short-term, fragmented or poorly matched to the realities of regeneration work.
A window of opportunity for government
Government policy is beginning to reflect the role that communities can play in high street revitalisation – directing Pride in Place Neighbourhood Boards to develop community-led governance over time, and committing £301 million to High Street Innovation Partnerships to support local communities to reimagine and revive struggling high streets for the future.
Now is the time to catalyse the vision of the civic high street into reality by matching it with the tools, powers and investment communities need to lead to lasting change.
In this report, we make recommendations to government that can – and must – establish the civic high street model as the explicit vision of the upcoming High Street Strategy. The recommendations would help tackle barriers to local regeneration and create a clear pathway for communities to take on long-term stewardship of high street assets, backed by the right policies, support and funding.
Our six policy recommendations are:
- Make a civic high street model the explicit vision of the High Street Strategy
- Reform access to and collection of high street data
- Roll out high street ‘innovation squads’ to help councils use their powers to shape the high street with local communities
- Design policies, support and funding to enable communities to progress from temporary use to long-term asset stewardship
- Establish a fair meanwhile lease agreement, alongside support for landlords and tenants
- Establish a Property Holding Vehicle to finance the community-led buyout of vacant and underutilised high street property.
With these six recommendations in place, community businesses will be better equipped to do what they do best: building local mandate, convening missing voices, and creating forums through which communities can shape change. From there, they can translate community ambition into tangible action – revitalising high streets, stewarding assets, and sustaining relationships over the long term.
What’s next
Power to Change’s upcoming work on high streets includes a new partnership with This Day to convene a network of cross-sector civic regeneration practitioners, commercial developers and policy experts. Together, we aim to provide the infrastructure and support needed to ensure government’s plans for high streets are realistic, deliverable and transformative for communities.
We’ll also evolve our Community-Led High Street Innovation demonstrator in response to the learning from this first phase, strengthening support for community businesses to take on long-term stewardship roles in their local high streets and town centres.
If you’re interested in this work and supporting new ways for communities to steward their local high streets and town centres – shaping the long-term future of their places through community ownership, governance and greater power-sharing with the public and private sector – we’d love to hear from you.
Get in touch with Kate McKenzie, Practice and Innovation Manager, at kate.mckenzie@powertochange.org.uk.
