Innovative ways to counter the high street problems
Few places have struggled to adjust to the challenges of modern life more than our country’s town centres. Hardly surprising in an age when shopping can be delivered to your front door at the push of a button and out of town shopping centres offer a tempting alternative to the retailers and local town centres which have suffered badly as a result.
I’ve been on a mission to find innovative ways to counter this problem in Gosport.
Of course, the Government deserves credit for taking steps to encourage small and medium sized businesses. The Budget had a strong business bent – the freeze on fuel duty, rise in VAT registration threshold (highest across the EU) and Growth Guarantee scheme.
And innovative enterprises, like ProPods are buying up vacant shops on Gosport High Street to reimagine it as a place to work, shop and live.
Gosport’s heritage is its strength, and a clear personal focus for me has been ensuring that our historical assets are used for the good of the area.
Last week, to mark English Tourism Week, I visited Priddy’s Hard, where development is continuing to turn the site – the
2nd oldest ordnance yard in the world – into a thriving hub for artists and creators. Advocating for businesses that have relocated there, as well as for expanding the scope of Gosport’s tourism offering, is vital to securing the investment our area needs.
The same is true for the Solent Enterprise Zone, which I worked to bring to Daedalus in 2012. To date the site has provided 1700 jobs in the area, alongside £80 million investment. Stubbington bypass was another huge piece in the puzzle, demonstrating that we were serious about making it easier for businesses to locate to Daedalus as part of a £100 million total infrastructure investment in the area. The strategy works – just last month I visited the site to see the £2.5 million redevelopment of Overlord Hangar by local company Marine Concepts UK. As that site expands, so does the Gosport peninsula’s reputation and capacity as a place to do business.
Plans are also underway as part of our successful £18M Levelling Up bid, to see the Rum Store, on Gosport historic waterfront re-developed in a way that will bring increased footfall to the area.
I hope to see Fort Blockhouse – the United Kingdom’s oldest fortification – prioritised for something similar and nagged the Defence Minister, James Cartlidge, for progress on the site in the Commons this week.
With literally hundreds of millions of pounds of investment brought into Gosport on my watch, it bodes well for the future.
Caroline Dinenage MP for Gosport