A day that started getting an update on a very technical new tackling #highstreet vacancy power ended in a room brimming with Positives ideas…
…and both are crucial to giving us the varied and vibrant town and city centres we love to see.
Thanks to Ojay McDonald and Karen Shields at the Association of Town & City Management I was able to listen in as MHCLG’s Vicki Bidwell updated on the progress being made by early adopters of the new High Street Rental Auctions power. If you’ve missed that, it’s essentially a way for councils to get long-empty units up for rent to new occupiers.
The process does take some setting up so we’ve not yet seen any get to auction stage. But for me that’s not the point. What we are seeing is council teams connecting with #property owners. Landlords and agents reaching out. Empty units being put on the market for sale or to let or done up, and some of them getting new tenants.
In other words what’s effectively the ‘place partnership’ approach we’d like every location where vacancy is an issue to have in play.
Meantime, while we wait for policy and regulatory change to fully kick in – and I’d love to see us go quicker – our places continue to draw on the ideas, experience and expertise of place leaders and managers, imagining, collaborating, getting stuff done.
The first launch event of Laura Harris’s brilliant #HighStreetPositives campaign was a shining illustration of that.
Complex power. Positives energy. Very different approaches. Both getting us there…!
