Community effort needed for recovery
THE recovery of our towns must be a community effort. We are starting to see what should be the early beginning of the economic recovery from coronavirus.
Non-essential retail shops have reopened, hospitality and tourism businesses can operate outside, with an indoor reopening date tentatively set for Monday.
Now that businesses can begin to reopen, we need to think about what the recovery across our communities looks like, and how we can ensure that this reaches every corner of Wales.
Our towns are the very heart of this.
Recently, FSB Wales has been pleased to work with Welsh Government’s Ministerial Town Centre Action Group, led by Deputy Minister for Housing and Local Government Hannah Blythyn MS.
Following FSB Wales’ report Open for Business, which focuses on how we can temporarily repurpose public spaces in order to help SMEs increase their ability to trade and profit while complying with social distancing, Welsh Government announced a £9m fund to support town centres.
This fund is aimed at helping town centres make adaptations including things such as outdoor awnings, outdoor tables and chairs, outdoor heating and screening, bollards, planters, small green infrastructure schemes, electricity supply and lighting to outdoor trading spaces and the temporary use of vacant buildings and the establishment of local markets.
FSB was really pleased to welcome this very practical way of helping our town centres and the businesses based there to begin to recover from the pandemic.
However, there is still so much more to do.
It’s important to remember that when it comes to our towns, this is not just about the economic recovery, but about how our entire communities recover from the significant changes that coronavirus wrought in all our lives.
Many SMEs stepped up during the pandemic, whether that was in order to help produce PPE or other supplies for the NHS, or to deliver groceries and meals to those who were unable to leave home due to shielding.
In the face of the biggest economic shock to their business in many years, those firms did what they could to give back to their communities.
Now, we are urging people to think about how they can help support these businesses as they begin the process of getting back on their feet.
At FSB, we’ll shortly be launching a new campaign to urge everyone to think about how we can support our small businesses which are the very centre of our local communities.
Our Business is Local will encourage us all to think about how we can shop locally, visit local tourism and hospitality businesses and enjoy some of the businesses that epitomise Wales’ culture and our unique offering.
We don’t yet know how the recovery will work in the longer term, but early signs suggest it is possibly going to be slower than we might have hoped or expected.
If we still hope to have vibrant high streets and independent businesses offering distinctly Welsh goods and services, then we all have to play our part in finding a way forward for them now.
This could look different across the country, which is why FSB Wales wants to see a localised approach to both repurposing public spaces and how we support businesses to trade.
We’ve started seeing examples crop up, such as Conwy council having previously offered businesses grant funding to help with adaptations, and we hope to see more.
We want to see businesses and communities empowered with the ability to think outside the box, to envisage how a sustainable future can be delivered for their town, and what support they might need to help achieve this.
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