8. What is the Government doing to regenerate town centres in South Wales East? OQ58220

Diolch. We have invested over £53.7 million in more than 100 projects that support the delivery of broader town-centre placemaking plans. We continue to invest and work in partnership with all sectors to make our towns and cities even better places to live, work and visit.

Diolch, Minister. Many of the town centres within my region are struggling. A perfect storm of high business rates, the rise of online shopping and the cost-of-living crisis has made prospects look bleak for many traders. Despite investment of £900 million in Wales in the last eight years, one in seven shops on a high street remain empty, according to Audit Wales. They also say that:

'Powers that can help stimulate town-centre regeneration are not utilised effectively nor consistently.'

What plans has the Welsh Government to learn lessons from previous strategies to address this downward trend? Do future plans include any ideas to repurpose parts of town centres to provide more leisure accommodation and hot-desking opportunities for start-up businesses or people who may now be working from home permanently?

Yes, absolutely, and this is a very difficult problem as the world changes around us. And so it's quite clear, isn't it, that many of us no longer shop in or go to town centres in the way that we used to in order to get ordinary goods and services. So, our 'town centre first' policy, which is embedded in the national planning framework, 'Future Wales', says that town centres should be the first consideration for all decisions on the location of workplaces and services, not just retail, so that we don't have out-of-town decisions made for everything you can think of, really, from the local college to entertainment venues and so on. That's to get the footfall and make the town a destination for people, which isn't just about retail.

You read out the list of challenges that we wrestle with every day. The town absolutely has to reinvent and reinvigorate itself into a place where people want to go, whether they want to go for an event or they want to go to socialise or to meet up with friends. So, it has to be a place that's welcoming and that has space that's family friendly and so on. During the pandemic, you'll know that we repurposed some road space for cafes and restaurants to make them more pleasant places to sit. It's a mystery, I think, to many of us why we don't do that in a more widespread way in Britain. We seem to feel that our weather is terrible, but anybody who has been to France in the winter will know that their weather is just as bad and they're still happily taking part in their outdoor spaces in their town squares and so on. So, we need to think again.

We've got a number of programmes across the Government designed to help local authorities do that thinking and to make sure that, when they make their decisions, as well as when we make our decisions, they think 'town centre first', to make sure that you get a concentration of services and people-pulls, if you like, into the town centre and you don't have this urban sprawl issue that, of course, knocks on to some of the other things we've discussed today about the use of peri-urban land and so on.