Call for rent and rates to be cut in bid to revive flagging high streets

RENTS and business rates need to be slashed in order to halt the steep decline of the high street, a retail property specialist has warned.

Tom Johnston, head of retail for Colliers International, has called for crisis talks between property owners and rate setters to lower the costs to high street retailers in the face of consumer gloom and the rise of internet shopping.

He said these factors, along with others, are having an increasingly evident impact on once-prime retail strongholds such as Sauchiehall Street and Argyle Street in Glasgow.

"Landlords, retailers, the local authorities and the government have to get together and see how we resolve this," said Johnston.

"If everyone is prepared to take a little less and planners are more amenable, I think something can be done."

Johnston called for a range of solutions to address the problems facing high street retail pitches across the UK, not least dropping rents and rates. He also sees opportunities for individual landlords to knock shops together to be more suitable to what retailers want.

The most recent figures from the Scottish Retail Consortium showed that shops faced their biggest slump in sales for more than a decade last month.

This week, Colliers will present its annual "Midsummer review", a "state of the nation" report on the UK property market which Johnston said would be "gloomy but realistic". He believes the rise in internet shopping, which is expected to double to 40 billion in the next four years, will see retailers consolidate three or four different shops in one large outlet.

These would more likely be based in out-of-town retail centres, continuing the growth of malls at the expense of town centres.

He argued the retail "zed" of Sauchiehall Street, Buchanan Street and Argyle Street was now more like a straight line as charity and pound shops encroach on what was once prime retail. Slackening of demand means formerly bristling high streets are in danger of remaining empty and "overshopped".

Colin Borland, the head of external affairs, Scotland, at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said: "There is no doubt the high street is not functioning."

Recently the FSB called on local authorities to adapt vacant retail units for other kinds of small business.

"The way people shop has changed. We have to think about what kind of town centres we want and need," said Borland.

But Derek Gordon, managing director at surveyors Eric Young & Co, said forming the sort of groups needed to enact change particularly among several owners is a "nightmare".He points to the "string of pearls" concept designed to unite owners to improve shops on Edinburgh's Princess Street which failed because of self-interest.

He said: "In any row of shops there will always be some where the tenant is doing fine and there is a rent review to come up - and the last thing the landlord of that shop wants is anything that will prevent the rent from going up."