Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 26 June 2018.
I agree, and it comes back to the point I made earlier on—and planning guidance has been changed to reflect this—we do need to make sure that our urban centres are more mixed. Some of them are, some of them are not. People have tended not to live in town centres for some time. We know that there are some businesses that will do well because they don't have online competition. If you're a cafe, there is no online competition. If you are a barber or a hairdresser, there's no online competition. There are some shops that have specialised particularly strongly in some products. They also perhaps have an online shop as well, which helps them to sustain their business. Ultimately, of course, the problem is that people aren't going through the doors as they used to; they're looking elsewhere. How do we look to resolve that? Well, making sure, I think, as well, that people are around in the day. One of the issues is, to my mind, that, in many town centres, shops are open between 9.30 a.m. and 5.30 p.m. when most people are not around, in reality. It's a question of looking again about flexible opening hours so that shopping centres are open, particularly in town centres, when people are actually out of work and back from work and able to shop, rather than having a model that is a model, really, that hasn't really existed for 30 or 40 years, where people would go in and shop during the course of the day because perhaps they weren't in paid employment. Those days have changed, and I think it's important as well that the challenges that exists with the retail sector are met with looking as well at how they can become more flexible in order to cater for the fact that life has changed for most of their customers.