There is one more item, namely item 9, the short debate. I call on Laura Anne Jones to introduce the short debate. 

Diolch, Llywydd. I'd like to give a minute of my time to Peter Fox, James Evans, Janet Finch-Saunders and Samuel Kurtz.

I'm pleased to bring forward this debate today, 'Regenerating town and city centres in Wales: More of the same will simply not work'. It is now more than ever important to discuss these issues after the past two years inflicting untold damages to our towns and city centres. It's crucially important that we discuss the key issues facing our towns and city centres and offer workable solutions to safeguard our constituents and communities going forward.

The challenges facing Wales following COVID-19 are similar to the regeneration of 1945 post-war Britain. National and local government need to deliver integrated solutions and make brave decisions going forward, providing honest, strong and dynamic leadership. Sadly, in my patch of South Wales East and the rest of Wales, the outlook for many town and city centres is bleak. Newport is thought to have the most closed shops in all of Britain, with more than one third in its centre permanently closed. This shows the scale of the challenge that we're facing here in Wales. 

Worryingly, COVID-19 has cost businesses in cities and large town centres more than a third of their potential takings, and shut down thousands since March 2020. The Centre for Cities 'City centres: past, present and future' report highlighted that cities like Newport have suffered significant challenges due to lack of investment over the years from high-skilled businesses. These firms increasingly prefer a city centre location as the dense business environment allows them to share ideas and knowledge easily. If a city centre is failing to attract these types of firms, the city as a whole will lose out on this investment, in turn affecting wage and career progression and opportunities locally. 

The lack of inward investment has had a devastating knock-on effect for the local and Welsh economy as a whole. Opportunities have been missed to attract high-skilled and higher-wage jobs to the area, which feeds back into the diversification issue that I mentioned previously. This is a prime example of why free ports, in partnership with the UK Government, should be promoted and brought to places like Newport, to encourage that inward investment. The report also shows the drastic scale of how bad it's now become in my own patch, with Newport having a 24 per cent shop vacancy rate, compared to Brighton and Birmingham, which have a between 8 and 10 per cent vacancy rate.

The pandemic cannot foot all the blame, though; things were definitely not rosy before the pandemic. For over a decade, our high streets have been battered by the perfect storm of recession, rising business rates and increased competition online. We see the results of this with the following: between 2012 and 2020, bank and building society branches reduced by 28.8 per cent, falling from 695 to 495; ATMs have fallen by 18 per cent in the last three years; post offices have fallen 3.9 per cent in the last decade. Since January 2020, 64 retail companies have failed, resulting in 6,882 stores closing, and affecting 133,600 employees in Great Britain. This has resulted in one in every seven shops on high streets in Wales being empty. However, it's far higher, as I said, in areas like Newport. The challenge will be now to attract customers back to retail after a prolonged period of relying on online sales.  

When the Welsh Government introduced restrictions on what retailers could and couldn't sell, this forced more people to rely on online shopping, which has developed over the years to be far more efficient with free, cheap deliveries and returns negating the need to physically go into a shop. It is quite clear to me that Wales needs a strategy to attract a more diverse range of service providers to our towns and cities. We all know that town centres can be vibrant and sustainable, provided that brave decisions are taken and they have ambitious leadership driving development. Sadly, Wales has been devoid of this kind of leadership with Welsh Labour at the helm. We've seen certain local authorities, like Monmouthshire, having to go out on their own to protect town centres, and they've been doing it with one arm tied behind their back from this Welsh Government.

We need to see some radical and some very basic ideas implemented that would revolutionise places such as Newport, such as: providing investment through Business Wales to support small and medium-sized enterprises to get an online presence to compete with larger businesses; where larger units and buildings remain empty, creating shared retail spaces to put an emphasis on creating restaurant quarters that champion the good quality, small independent restaurants; taking tougher action against anti-social behaviour, such as employing more community safety wardens and pressing the police to increase their city centre presence so that people feel safe again in their towns and cities; and slashing business rates so that it frees up the tax burden on retailers, allowing for the potential to expand, reinvest and create more jobs locally. Additionally, it would help reinvigorate town centres, creating stimuli to attract businesses to town centres.

We need to assess and cut car parking charges. For example, Cwmbran is a far more preferred option in my area over Newport city centre, because of the range of businesses and the free parking opportunities. It's not rocket science. There are viable, easy ways to reinvigorate our town centres to make them a force to be reckoned with once again. My own area's city, Newport, used to be a vibrant place; it used to be the place to go, and many would travel far and wide from South Wales East to go there to shop. There is no excuse for it not to be again. Quite simply, we need to make a place so that people want to visit their town and city centres again. We need to make sure that people, instead of getting a train from Cwmbran to Cardiff or Chepstow to Bristol, find reasons to come to places like Newport.

We can't think of our high streets as purely shops anymore. We need to be creative and inventive with the space that we have to offer, creating a shopping experience that is a different to anything that you can get online. Town centres need to be a place where people come to learn, for public services, to live and to share time. They have to have the whole mix, and it needs to keep moving with the times. Moving with the times must also mean that online and offline must merge together. All retailers, no matter how small, should be able to offer a basic e-commerce platform so that customers can shop in whatever way is convenient for them. This would mean that customers can see what's in store before they take a trip to their high street, or they can choose to order directly from the shop. Once again, it begins with being inventive and offering the correct support to local businesses so that they can flourish.   

However, none of this will be possible unless local councils and Welsh Government decide what type of country we want to live in, and intervene to protect the social infrastructure. As industry experts have long warned that rising business rates are part of the reason behind Wales's empty shop units, we need to go back to basics in creating a low-tax, enticing environment for new businesses to flourish and confidently set up shop. Simple initiatives like offering business rate discounts for independents and entrepreneurs, refusing out-of-town planning approval and scrapping parking charges will go a long way in helping our high streets.

To conclude, we need greater support and emphasis put on our town and city centres from this Government, as the 'town centre first' policy used by the Welsh Labour Government has been nothing short of abject failure. No longer can they be allowed to languish and be left behind Cardiff. They need immediate support to stop the drift and slow decline. Some of the ideas that I have highlighted here today would not only set our towns and cities back on the right path, Llywydd, but they would also create an exciting environment for inward investment and well-paying job opportunities. I look forward to hearing from colleagues in this Chamber today on their thoughts and ideas on how we can revitalise our hard-hit town and city centres, as more of the same would just not suffice.

A one-minute contribution from, to start with, Peter Fox.

Thank you, Llywydd, and thank you, Laura, for giving me a minute of your time. No doubt, there will be some things that will be repeated among the contributions. Two years of pandemic and the growing trend of online shopping have added to the changing way that people use our towns. This has brought huge challenges to our high streets and its businesses. But, businesses can't address the future alone. Concerted efforts from the Welsh Government, together with local authorities, need to be stepped up throughout Wales. We can see, just by looking at Abergavenny, what a vibrant high street can look like. It is becoming widely recognised that, to re-energise our high streets and towns, we need to transform them into something more than just traditional town centres, changing them into vibrant, popular visitor destinations. The ambience of the town, the wide variety of experience that it offers, its diverse hospitality sector, its niche shopping experiences and the coffee shops are the ingredients to making a successful visitor attraction. But, we need short-term incentives to help these sites, such as continued relief with stifling business rates. We welcome what is happening at the moment in Wales, but that needs to be continued, and also looking at things, as I have raised here in the Chamber with the Minister for Economy, like the high-street voucher scheme, where we can enable people to invest and spend in their local high street. However, the immediate priority has to be getting adequate financial support into the businesses that have been hit most. If Ministers fail to do this in a way that truly recognises the difficulties they face, the very fabric that makes our towns what they are will be lost. We must guard against Wales being haunted by any ghost towns.

I'd like to thank you, Laura Anne, for giving me a minute of your time. Town centres in communities in my great constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire are at the very heart of the communities. It's where people gather in coffee shops, pubs, restaurants and shops for essential goods, where they recognise the great work of our high street. Rural Wales is home to some of the most deprived areas across the country. The GVA of mid Wales is the lowest out of the UK economic regions, at £17,628 per head in 2019. Reviving our town centres is vital to tackling poverty and increasing the wealth of families in places such as mid Wales. This must be done by investing properly in supporting private enterprise and entrepreneurship. If the Government gave out business loans to young entrepreneurs in the same way that it gives out student loans, I'm sure this country would be in a very, very different economic place. Diolch, Llywydd, and thank you, Laura.

I'd like to thank Laura Anne Jones for her excellent contribution, and I don't think that we do talk about this enough. She recognised the value of our high streets, and how the initiatives—. We could look at business rates, car parking charges, new initiatives. It's a fact that—. Oh, I must declare an interest as a commercial properties owner. I beg your pardon, Llywydd. I had it written down here that I must declare an interest, and I went off on one.

So, the high street is changing, but we must embrace those changes. Now, I'm very pleased to represent the beautiful constituency of Aberconwy, where we have fabulous high streets. But, we have a problem, Deputy Minister, and that is the length of time that it takes for change of occupier, in terms of shop units. I have many letting agents who come to me, I have many tenants wanting to move into premises, and I have many landlords. If you want to change from class A1 to class A3—if you want to change a particular business—and you require planning permission, it can take up to nine or even 12 months to get that planning permission. So, my simple plea to you is: can you do something in our overstretched planning departments to ensure that they have the capacity to turn around planning applications very quickly, so that those properties are not lying empty in the high street, making our high streets look, as you rightly pointed out, Peter, more like ghost towns? It's crucial that we have a really speedy and fast-tracking planning process. Diolch, Llywydd.

So, if we cast our minds back to 2010, I was still at school, Corona was just but a beer, and the people of Carmarthen welcomed Debenhams to their town centre at St Catherine's Walk. However, only 11 short years later, in May of last year, it shut, leaving a 6000 sq m hole in the town centre. But thankfully, due to £18.5 million-worth of investment—£15 million from the UK Government—the former Debenhams shop is being redeveloped into a gym, a home for some of the county's museum collections, and a welcome centre for tourists into Wales's oldest town. This project is being developed by the local health board and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. However, as Dr Edward Jones said, an economics lecturer from Bangor University, 

'It's going to be a very different high street to what we're used to.'

So, let's not be afraid of this change. As projects such as the Carmarthen hub bring about necessary footfall into our town centres, into our high streets once again, let's welcome it and embrace the change it brings. Diolch.

The Deputy Minister for Climate Change, now, to reply to the debate—Lee Waters.

Thank you for tabling the motion and for the range of contributions. I think the contributions show that, despite a clear consensus on the problem, there is no real clear consensus on the solution, because this is complex. There is a whole range of forces coming together. This is fundamentally about a changing marketplace, and James Evans in his contribution championed the role of the market in accelerating change, and we should also recognise that the market has also brought about many of the symptoms described by Members. The rise of supermarkets, I think, is one of the most significant forces to have shaped our town centres, when you think, inside the supermarket now, they sell almost everything that used to be sold by shops some 30 years ago in the town centre. The move, then, out of town, and then the move online have all come together to make town centres across the UK shadows of their former selves. And if it was as simple as Laura Anne Jones set out in her speech, as an issue of local political leadership, then you would expect to see a very different picture across the UK, but we do not. There are very similar trends right across the UK, and in fact right across the western world, as these forces have all been rippling their way through.

We have recently published a set of reports, one by Audit Wales and another that I commissioned from Manchester university's Professor Karel Williams, 'Small Towns, Big Issues', which sets down the challenge but also says we need a complex, joined-up intervention to tackle the range of issues at play here, and we are now working through that. I've pulled together a group of experts to go through this report in detail, to understand how we can operationalise this, and Janet Finch-Saunders points out one of the issues, which is around the issue of the resource for planning departments. That is no doubt a factor. There is no simple answer to that, because resource is tight. It's one of the reasons why we've been supporting corporate joint committees to be able to pool resource and expertise across a region, to help with common services. They're also looking at the issue of the role of landlords and rents, which clearly is a constraint for many.

The changing shape of a town centre and the fact that town centres, often, are surrounded by a 'doughnut', as Karel Williams describes, of low-income neighbourhoods, are driving a different cash flow into the town centre, whereas out-of-town is attracting higher income customers, which is in turn driving those type of shops and creating a spiral of decline. And we're seeing in those out-of-town shopping centres now an increasing hollowing out of empty units right across out-of-town shopping centres, across America and Europe, so these aren't forces that we face alone. And I think we do need to rethink the role of retail, both out of town and in town, and, as Sam Kurtz said in his contribution, the example of the 'town centre first' approach that we have championed in Carmarthen, of bringing public services into town centres to give footfall and to put services rather than just retail in the centre of where the shops and the town centres see their role. 

So, there are definitely changing dynamics at play. Many of these are complex. There is not a simple answer to a lot of these, and, as I say, we have set out, through an analysis by an independent academic, and now, through creating what they call an alliance for change, a commitment to work through these. But I think there are spots of optimism, and the example of Newport, I think, is one. I think Laura Anne Jones was overly harsh on Newport; no doubt it has struggled, as lots of towns have struggled. There has been some £30 million of Welsh Government investment in Newport. But I think the new revived market is an example of where the council has worked dynamically alongside the Welsh Government and the private sector, and we are hoping to see next month the opening of the new Newport market, with over 100 traders, a food court, a bar, workspaces, a gym and a rooftop garden, and I think that will create a positive dynamic that will attract people in and hopefully have a ripple effect.

But there's no point in kidding ourselves that there are either partisan or simple solutions at hand, and I think it behoves us all to try and work together to identify some things that can be done. If it was as simple as simply rejigging business rates, then we'd have seen a reaction before now, because we have put significant support in for business rates across Wales for some time and it hasn't made a great deal of difference, to be honest. So, the search for simple answers, I think, is going to be a futile one; we need to recognise the complexity of this, recognise the multiplicity of forces at play and try and work together through building alliances for change in all sectors across the country to bring about a fresh purpose for our town centres.

I thank the Deputy Minister, and I thank you for that short debate. That brings today's proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 18:11.