I’d really like to thank Prof Leigh Sparks for sharing his Stirlingretail platform for this piece on tackling vacancy…!
“A few years ago a Council leader, not too far from here, asked me what single thing could he do to tackle vacancy in the town centre. I said contact Iain Nicholson of the Vacant Shops Academy (I have posted something with/about him before) and use his approach. Nothing of course happened and nothing much has changed in that town centre.
This week at Scotland’s Towns Partnership’s Cross-Party Group meeting, Ross Grant from Aberdeen Inspired (the Business Improvement District) discussed the City’s approach to vacancy, both on-street but especially in upper floors. A report on their upper floor work is going through Aberdeen City Council and will be available for wider dissemination. Ross stressed the role of a Technical Panel focusing on the upper floors, building a consensus approach site by site, requiring all to be “curators of our spaces” and utilising the media in a positive way.
Aberdeen has been something of a success story in terms of impacting vacancy and is a place Iain has been working with. So I thought it was time I asked Iain to lay out his approach and thoughts again in a further post.
So over to Iain and what every place could/should be doing:
“Ask (and resource) every local authority to report on vacancy numbers twice a year, and work with agents, landlords, businesses, community, cultural organisations, chamber and BID where there is one to overcome barriers to letting empty units.”
It is item one of a tackling vacancy-focused manifesto I penned before the last General Election, but almost a year on, it seems an even more valuable way to reduce empty unit numbers in town and city centres and bring down the long-stuck 14% national rate.
The Vacant Shops Academy has worked or is working with 36 locations now and we’ve visited around the same number of others in its nearly three and a half years, all the time strengthening our belief in the ‘audit, engage, encourage, promote’ approach to tackling vacancy.
Our approach has two fundamental elements. First, setting up a tackling vacancy-focused ‘place partnership’ to bring together agents, landlords, businesses, community, cultural organisations, council(s), chamber, BID where there is one, and others identified locally, to work on the issue. Its role includes getting inside priority empty units, as a team, to understand barriers to let, use options and what each stakeholder can contribute to moving things forward. That might involve targeting a particular type of occupier, splitting it up, going for pop-up use initially, creating a grant scheme to help overcome the costs of getting the unit fit to occupy and more.
We now divide town or city centre vacancy into three types:
- Those with rates in the mid / high teens or over 20%;
- Places with smaller headline figures but where there are tricky-to-let often larger, sometimes heritage buildings, left empty by departing national brands, department stores or banks;
- Towns with low vacancy but residents and existing businesses concerned about the changing mix away from retail towards services and a sense that makes their place less attractive.
The ‘place partnership’ approach can help with all these.
We’ve just checked in with some early adopters of our approach and all have seen vacancy rates reduced, some very significantly. Ripon BID for example reported: “We are running at 6% currently with 14 properties vacant, down from 12% in March 2024”. Aberdeen Union Street is another to see its vacancy rate halved, in their case in 18 months from a very high 25% starting point, making them a national beacon for the ‘place partnership’ approach.
Aberdeen are also continuing to innovate by adopting a new collaborative approach to another crucial town and city centres issue, that of un- and under-used upper floors. Following a study we ran for them on challenges and potential solutions around this, Aberdeen started to take a team combining the expertise of council planning, conservation and building standards officers with private sector architects, developers, lettings agents, BID and community colleagues into vacant upper floors on Union Street, to assess opportunities and barriers, and identify where policy or regulation change might be needed to drive change. It’s early stages yet but there’s a growing sense that this too is a model other places can deploy.
The second theme for places to work on is what we call alternative or additional use types. Retail, hospitality and services still have a big part to play, but where town or city centres are attracting these in lower numbers, we suggest they look at arts & crafts, creative, culture, community, history & heritage, leisure, education, health and health & wellbeing as go-to options. These have the extra advantage of adding to the variety and so resilience of places, especially as several of them deliver the experiential we know many customers and visitors are looking for. We’re now seeing more examples of these kinds of uses making a positive impact so that there’s useful case study material for places to draw on.
This is also where the two themes tie together because, typically, securing these ‘alternative’ uses is more challenging than handing the keys to a shop, venue or services business. The wider range of skills, experience and connections in the ‘place partnership’ can help make this more easily achievable.
We know the approach works, we’re seeing more places taking it up, and it’d be great to see that everywhere vacancy is a challenge, councils and communities are actively on the case.
