Key priorities have been identified

VISION Stockport has been talking with businesses in the BID area and has identified three key priorities.

These are; improving the customer experience; marketing Stockport town centre; and doing business.

Improving customer experience is about making people want to come to Stockport, and stay when they arrive, and includes things like working with retailers to create a better shopping experience, improving parking, improving pedestrian routes, tackling empty properties, exploring the possibility of deploying volunteers to welcome people to the town, and helping to create an evening and night time economy.

Marketing the town centre will involve defining what is special about the town, building a single trusted brand, setting up a website to bring together all the events and activities going on in the town centre, holding new events and building on existing ones such as Foodie Friday and the Fringe Festival, and promoting Stockport as a destination.

The third priority is to make it easier to do business in Stockport by working with the police to improve safety, reducing business costs, facilitating funding to support new small businesses, supporting business networking events, establishing a business volunteering scheme, and sourcing and analysing data such as footfall and crime patterns to understand why some areas are performing better than others.