Shops boom after pay and display wrecked

A wilful act of vandalism in Wales has proved that shoppers will return if they can linger without charge

SHOPPERS are flocking to a town where thieves wrecked the car park pay and display machines, traders say.

The local council has yet to find the £24,000 needed to fix machines at four sites that were damaged in June, but shopkeepers have reported a noticeable difference in trade.

“While we would never condone criminal activity, the fact remains that traders throughout town are reporting a rise in footfall since those machines were put out of action,” said Martin Radley, the chairman of Cardigan Traders in Mid Wales.

“People who have enjoyed free parking at supermarkets are finding they actually prefer going to small, independent shops, which offer goods of a far better quality.” People were staying longer and spending more, he added.

“The situation demonstrates what we’ve been saying for years; if you have lower parking fees, or even no fees altogether, then people will come into town,” he said. “The benefits are tangi- ble, it’s had a major effect on trade in the town and the summer holiday effect hasn’t even kicked in yet.

“We don’t want Ceredigion [council] to break too much sweat [fixing the machines], at least not until the summer is over.” He said that the rise in shoppers could be traced directly back to early June when thieves with crowbars targeted the ticket machines at four locations.

Earlier this week, town councillors were told that a rise in customers was due to a combination of free parking, the opening of Cardigan castle, which has just begun admitting the public after a £12 million restoration, and the summer holiday period.

Jane Roche, a town councillor who runs a cafe in the centre, said that customers had told her they were taking advantage of the free parking to stay longer.

“One trader told me it was difficult to believe the difference it had made,” said Melfydd George, another town councillor.

It’s an ill wind, as they say – and they are saying it rather a lot in Cardigan these days. The people of the ancient Welsh town – whose castle hosted the first competitive Eisteddfod 839 years ago – were scandalised six weeks ago when all the pay-anddisplay machines in its car parks were crowbarred open on a single night. The local Ceredigion County Council denounced the “wilful damage” and regretted “unnecessary inconvenience” to drivers.

But the shock has turned to smiles as the cash-strapped council has struggled to find the £22,500 needed to repair the machines, and shoppers and town-centre traders alike are enjoying far from inconvenient effects. And the episode appears to point to one solution to the ills of Britain’s ailing high streets.

For the enforced free parking has led to an unprecedented boom for the town’s small shops, with takings rising by up to 50 per cent. Customers who used to eschew feeding £1.20 an hour into the machines – instead driving to out-of-town supermarkets – have been flocking back to the town centre. Once there, they have been lingering for hours in its shops, cafés and restaurants.

While no one, rightly, seeks to justify the vandalism, the windfall is all the sweeter because the council has a ferocious record in the town, issuing 758 tickets in the year to June in just one street. This week, the pleasure peaked as traders told a meeting how their businesses were now “thriving”.

“We’ve long campaigned for free parking and – while we don’t condone the damage to the machines – the difference it has made is unbelievable,” says butcher Keith Davies, a former chairman of Cardigan Traders. The present occupant of the post, baker Martin Radley, describes how the newly “level playing field” has enabled supermarket shoppers to find they prefer the “far better quality” on offer at small, independent establishments.

Their words will echo all around the country. Only 40 per cent of our total spend now takes place on Britain’s 5,400 high streets and similar shopping areas. Ninety-seven per cent of groceries are purchased in the country’s 8,000 supermarkets, which also allocate more than a third of their total space to other goods. The tally of shops in Britain has fallen from 750,000 to 250,000 since the Sixties, while the number of superstores has grown by 35 per cent in a decade. Some 40,000 shops now stand empty.

The contrast between free parking at supermarkets and charges in town centres has been one of the drivers of this change. A joint study by the Association of Town and City Management and the British Parking Association of tariffs in 90 towns and cities two-and-a-half years ago prompted concerns that they were “being raised to levels which stifle local trade”.

This has been encouraged by official Government planning guidance, which has also deterred lowering charges to attract shoppers into town. Often drivers also have to pay to park on Sundays, and – in all – councils raise well over £1 billion a year from the tariffs.

Eight years ago a Conservative Party policy document sought to tackle the problem. The 547-page Quality of Life review – produced by a group headed by the former environment minister John Gummer and the new Tory green adviser Zac Goldsmith, and rightly hailed by David Cameron as “the most thoughtful report that any party in Britain has produced on the environment”, contained a proposal that councils should be allowed to make out-of-town supermarkets charge for parking. Fees would not be allowed to exceed those in town and could be dedicated to improve public transport to ease access to high streets and boost their trade.

The proposal was leaked, in an apparent attempt to discredit the whole report, and denounced as “mind-boggling”, “tosh”, and a new “poll tax”. Mr Cameron began to back away from it even before the report was published, and it was quickly abandoned. Goldsmith was forced to call it a misjudgment and it was cited as evidence that he “will never make much political impact”.

A political age later, it will be interesting to see whether the Cardigan experience will encourage the likely Tory candidate to be the next Mayor of London to return to the idea, if he makes it into City Hall.