Bold and Innovative Ideas for Your Town’s Vision and Strategy
Tom Bridges
The Towns Fund provides a real opportunity to bring forward bold and innovative ideas and projects to help transform the economic prospects of your town, its people and businesses. It is important to avoid the risk of too many objectives and small interventions lacking in coherence cumulatively, where the impact will be dissipated. Instead there is scope to focus on a small number of strategic objectives and big ideas that have the potential to make a significant difference, which should stem from analysis considering the main opportunities and challenges in your town.
Rethinking and re-shaping the town centre – in the context of the shift from bricks to clicks in retail, which has been accelerated during lockdown, there may be a need to rethink the role and functions of your town centre, and to reshape it to provide less and / or different retail space, and introduce new uses such as residential, education, health, and public space. The High Streets Taskforce have produced some useful resources and there will need to be a clear link to any Future High Streets Fund proposals in your TIP.
The 15-minute town – Covid has created a focus on how people can access services and meet their daily needs within a 15-minute walk or cycle. The 15-minute city concept has been developed by several city mayors and is well suited to towns in England. Interventions might include revitalising local centres, creating new green and recreational spaces, and improved walking and cycle routes.
Backing innovators and entrepreneurs – there may be economic specialisms or areas of potential amongst your town’s business base that could be developed through increased investment in research and redevelopment (R&D), for example in manufacturing, energy, ports, and health and social care. Through its R&D roadmap the Government is seeking to increase overall investment in and geographical spread of R&D, and position it closer to industry and where there can be commercial pull through (we need to focus on the “D” not just the “R”).
Town as a testbed – there is potential to attract investment and improve services and outcomes and use your town for testing innovation in the real-world. This could be done by putting in place digital technology, open data, and making streets and spaces available for testing innovations such as autonomous deliveries, reallocating roadspace, social prescribing, initiatives to improve air quality, reduce carbon emissions, tackle flood-risk, or new ways of delivering services.
Towns of learning – you could use the cities of learning concept to develop coherent strategies for widening access to learning, preparing young people for the world of work, helping people develop and adapt their skills in the context of economic and technological change, supporting people to progress from low-paid jobs (for example, see Wakefield’s step-up programme) and bringing businesses and the education and skills system closer together. This can provide a framework for capital investments in new school, college and university facilities, and strategic partnerships with FE and HE institutions, including through civic university agreements (for example see Nottingham Trent University’s partnership with Vision West Nottinghamshire College in Mansfield).
Creating greater value from leisure and tourism – whilst the tourism and leisure sector was hit hard in lockdown, increases in domestic tourism now provide an opportunity to maximise your town’s untapped potential as a visitor destination. By looking strategically at visitor attractions, gateways such as railway stations, tourism and hospitality businesses, and their branding and marketing, you could develop coherent plans for improving their offer to visitors and increase the number of jobs and businesses in this sector.
Maximising the impact of anchor institutions – an “anchor institution” is a large organisation which through a combination of its employment, investment and procurement makes a significant and strategic contribution to a town’s economy. They can be in the public or not-for-profit sector, for example local authorities, the NHS, or universities and colleges, but can also be large private sector employers. Towns can develop partnerships with these organisations to identify how best to drive positive employment, skills and business outcomes through the way in which these organisations engage with local people, workforces and businesses. This can include aligning capital investment plans to support regeneration and economic growth.
For all big, bold, innovative ideas it will be essential to build a broad-based coalition of support amongst stakeholders and your Town Board, and to align funding and interventions across the Stronger Towns Fund, other programmes, and business as usual investments.