Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced a set of new measures aimed at rejuvenating Britain’s High Streets.
These include giving local councils increased powers to prevent the opening of vape shops, and adult gaming centres.
“For many people, the high streets they grew up with have become unrecognisable” Burnham told reporters.
Opposition parties have broadly supported the plans, but believe the government should also reduce business rates in order to support small businesses.
Increased Powers for Councils
The newly announced plans are the latest in a series of devolution measures, policies which give increased powers to local government, announced by Andy Burnham since he became Prime Minister last month.
Vape shops will now need express permission from their local council before they are permitted to start trading. It will also become illegal for any shop selling vapes to describe themselves as a general convenience store, in order to avoid the new laws.
Shops found to be breaking these laws and selling tobacco illegally could now be closed for up to 12 months.
On top of this, the new plans would see the removal of the “aim to permit” rule, that was introduced by the 2005 Gambling Act.
Under “aim to permit” councils were obliged to allow businesses such as betting shops and adult gaming centres to open, if they met all other requirements.
Instead adult gaming centres will require specific planning permission before opening.
Burnham hopes that by providing councils with greater powers to prevent vape shops and gambling opening, the government will enable other shops to fill their places.
When announcing the new laws, the Prime Minister said that, “The rise of vape shops, betting shops and rogue operators have replaced the shops, services and community spaces that people are crying out for.”
Does Britain Have a Vape Shop Problem?
A report by the public health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) published a report on the use of vapes across Britain last month.
ASH found that roughly 10% of British adults vaped. This was a similar level to what had been estimated by the 2024 survey, but roughly six times higher than what ASH’s first survey had estimated in 2012.
More concerningly, the report found that 7.8% of British adults vaped daily, compared to only 4.5% in 2020.
The use of disposable vapes, the type most commonly purchased from vape shops, and potentially the most environmentally damaging, does appear to have peaked in 2023 however.
One of the most common justifications of the loose regulation of the vape shop industry, is that vaping acts as a less harmful substitute for other tobacco products such as cigarettes.
ASH’s data shows a rough correlation between the rise of vaping across Britain, and a decline in the proportion adults smoking. This is not a perfect correlation however, with ASH estimating that roughly 1.8 million British adults both vaped and smoked regularly.
Will This Save Britain’s High Streets? (And Does it Need To?)
Concerns about the decline of Britain’s high streets have been a political talking point since the 1970s, when many local authorities began approving out-of-town shopping centres.
This exaggerated the impacts of the “Beeching Axe” railway closures of the 1960s, which restricted rail access to many town centres.
In more recent times, high street stores have had to compete with the rise of online shopping, as new technology has reduced the cost of importing retail goods.
The opposition believe that the only way to reverse this perceived gradual decline is by reducing business rates, a tax paid by the owners of non-domestic properties.
“Unless the government takes steps to support high streets and hard-working businesses, Labour’s increases in planning regulation will just mean more empty and boarded up shops” said the Shadow Communities Secretary James Cleverly, in response to Burnham’s announcement.
Both the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesperson Max Wilkinson and Reform UK’s economy spokesperson Robert Jenrick also called for a complete re-design of the business rates system.
Despite the broad agreement among the major parties that Britain’s high streets need government intervention in order to remain relevant, the data doesn’t necessarily support this.
The Office for National Statistics estimated in March that while employment in the high street retail sector had shrunk by almost 20% since 2015, employment in all other high street sectors had risen.
This suggests that while the role of high streets is shifting from being primarily retail based to instead being centred around services such as accommodation and catering, they are not necessarily experiencing a long-term decline.
Final Thought
The rise of vape shops as smoking rates have fallen is a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences.
Burnham hopes to address this by restricting access to vapes, but will only succeed if councils are given the resources necessary to enforce closure orders on vape shops, and regulate adult gaming centres.
Vape shops are not the primary cause of the decline of Britain’s high streets, and restricting them will not return Britain’s town centres to how they were 60 years ago.
That isn’t necessarily as much of an issue as the major parties seem to believe however. The data proves that, if people have the necessary disposable income, they will use the high streets.
These policies should therefore be judged on their social, rather than their economic impact.
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