Save the High Street has flopped, Portas concedes

THE “Save the High Street” campaign spearheaded by Mary Portas has failed, after the towns under her watch lost nearly a thousand shops in five years.

The government-backed plan, launched in a blaze of publicity by the self-styled “Queen of Shops”, involved 12 towns being handed a portion of a £1.2million grant to transform them into thriving retail hubs. But since it began in 2012 the towns – Bedford, Croydon, Dartford, Greater Bedminster, Liskeard, Margate, Market Rasen, Nelson, Newbiggin-by-the-sea, Stockport, Stockton-on-tees and Wolverhampton – have lost nearly one in five of their shops, research by the Local Data Company found, around the same rate of decline as the rest of the country.

Following the disclosure, Portas accused the Government of using her campaign as a PR exercise but failing to back it up with policies. She told You And Yours on BBC Radio 4: “It was a weighted PR campaign which looked like, ‘Hey, we’re doing something’ and I hoped it might kick-start something – but it didn’t.”

She renewed calls for Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, to scrap business rates, recent increases to which she predicted would kill a third of shops.

She told The Daily Telegraph: “It feels like there was this great splash from Government, that they were getting behind businesses. But they can’t say that and then treble rates.”