Walk down almost any English high street outside the prosperous south and you'll get the same experience... a vape shop, a barber, three charity shops, a Greggs, and a long stretch of shuttered frontage with faded letting agent boards in the windows.
And reversing this may require something considerably more radical than fiddling with business rates.....
High streets have traditionally done two jobs at once. They were retail hubs, obviously, but they were also social hubs — the benches, the safety in numbers, the reason to walk somewhere and bump into people. The shopping paid for the sociability. Nobody ever designed it that way; it was a happy by-product of everyone needing to buy things in the same place.
Online sales reached 29.4% of all retail spending in Great Britain in June 2026, the highest share since April 2021 and a world away from the roughly 19% of 2019. Nearly a third of the money that used to walk past those benches now goes through a warehouse in Dunstable instead.
What's striking is that the retail sector itself is not in freefall — it's relocating. Retail parks recorded vacancy rates of about 6.1% in 2025, while prime central London streets sit at 5% or below and the best shopping centres approach full occupancy. Shops are doing fine. It's high streets that are struggling, which tells you the problem is about place, not about retail.
An empty shop is not usually a shop nobody wants. It's often a shop whose owner has no particular incentive to fill it. Holding a vacant unit can be perfectly rational if you're carrying it on a balance sheet at an optimistic valuation, waiting for a regeneration scheme, or you're an overseas investor for whom the building is a parking space for capital rather than a business.
Maybe owners should be compelled to bring buildings back into use or surrender them...?
Councils can't be relied upon to do this — they have compulsory purchase powers but rarely the capacity or confidence to use them. Anyone who has watched a district council try to procure a bin lorry will find this persuasive.
Maybe we need a National Trust for the high street..?
Would it actually work?
The underlying logic is sound: replace lost retail footfall with housing, colleges and municipal services, so the social function survives even though the shopping doesn't.
The risks are obvious. Any body with the power to force property out of private hands will attract lobbying, legal challenge and eventually capture. And "state-backed capital vehicle" is precisely the sort of phrase that arrives in a white paper and leaves as a consultation.
The honest conclusion is that we can't shop our way back to the high street of 1985, and we shouldn't try. The question is whether town centres become places people live and go to, or car parks with a Costa attached.
That's a decision about land and who controls it. Business rates were never going to answer it
