Coronavirus diary, Tuesday 2 March 2021

Throughout the country, in high streets and town centres, businesses, including shops and pubs, have been disappearing at an alarming rate.

Many of them, once flourishing and attractive, are now sad sights with failed flagship department stores and shops and other once busy businesses boarded up, defiled by graffiti.

The 2008 financial crash hastened the decline and the slight recovery since has been stopped in its tracks by coronavirus.

Now we have the usual cry, ‘Something must be done!' But what? By whom?

The problem is not new. The collapse of coal mining and other traditional industries laid waste to many town centres while others have survived and flourished. 

They have done so by being innovative; by attracting new businesses with highly paid jobs that support shops and entertainment services. Among those are big cities including Birmingham and Manchester 

Cardiff, a modest sized capital, has bucked the trend by developing its national and the international tourist and sporting attraction of its city centre assets like the Principality Stadium - on the site of the former, revered Cardiff Arms Park.

Its once down-at-heel city centre has been revitalised by BBC Wales’s magnificent new headquarters and studio complex that dominates the heart of the city.

Despite losing all five of its traditional family owned department stores, it still has an excellent shopping centre and its famous arcades with traditional shops.

Dozens of hotels have been built to cater for the boom, halted by coronavirus, which has devastated traditional destinations including Blackpool and Brighton which had depended on tourism.

Action should have been taken years ago after a government ordered survey and report on ‘ghost’ town centres and how they could be revived.

Mary Portas, an expert with 30 years' experience in the consumer business, spent six months delving into Britain’s  high street maladies.

Her decisive, clear and jargon free report made 20 specific recommendations. 

She had wasted her time. Not one of them was taken up by the government.

There has since been a flurry of studies and reports, another by the government in 2018 ordered by the ‘High Streets Minister’Jake Perry MP - whatever happened to him? - followed a year later by the City Centres, Past, Present and Future report by a research and policy institute.

So there has been plenty of advice but an inexcusable lack of action. Let us see if the four countries listen and act this time.