Whether over coffee at Patisserie Valerie or a cocktail at Giraffe, entrepreneur Luke Johnson might wish to host a tête-à-tête with Mary Portas, Eric Pickles and Westfield’s Bill Giouroukos sometime soon. It’s sorely needed.
At this week’s BCSC conference in Liverpool, fireworks flew. Portas issued something akin to a football manager’s “back me or sack me” plea, while Johnson labelled landlords intransigent dinosaurs. It was incendiary stuff.
Johnson first. Having moved on from his Pizza Express and Strada days to stylish cafes and feel-good restaurants, he lit the blue touchpaper with a withering attack on landlords.
Demanding an end to upwards-only rent reviews, a switch to monthly rents and transparent service charges, Johnson said: “The current landlord-tenant adversarial model is broken; there will be many more insolvencies unless landlords compromise.
“If there isn’t wholesale change to some of the golden rules of the property industry, we can only expect relentless difficulties.”
Some will disagree. But what Johnson articulated better than most is why change is not just desirable for hard-pressed tenants, but why it is vital for our national economic health.
Cultural change
He warned of cultural change in the UK: unless the shopping experience is enhanced, why not simply shop online?
Listen to the customer, he said, and give them the experiential, not just the transactional: more ping pong and bingo and fewer bland clothing stores. Landlords should fly to San Francisco and court dynamic young occupiers and incentivise them to come to their centres in the UK.
And, after all, he said, it’s not just about the high street versus the shopping centre. “We have got to find ways of persuading citizens to desert Sky and the Wii console,” he trumpeted.
It fell to Giouroukos to try to stamp on the embers, telling EGTV he would happily sit down with Johnson to discuss how things could be improved (see our conference dailies in the Estates Gazette App).
Drawing the biggest crowd of the week, the Queen of Shops was a little less incendiary and swiftly won over the room by launching a blistering attack on the government amid fears that her high street review is losing momentum.
Tantalisingly, she said she feared the government’s review to re-energise the high street was just a public relations exercise: “I’m trying to recreate the high street. Is this just a big PR stunt by the government or a real effort? If we are putting the town centres first, the government needs to address the issues.”
Welcoming commitment
The government machine creaked into motion, with a spokesman for the department for Communities and Local Government telling EG after her speech: “We welcome the commitment that Mary Portas has given to making our high streets the beating hearts of local communities, and the passion that she brings to that work. Like Mary, ministers consider improving our town centres a top priority, and the government is already implementing a number of recommendations from her review.”
It was all lively stuff, but also a little pathetic. Attacks were launched from the podium, and responses were duly delivered. The art of constructive dialogue seems to have been lost to posturing and jostling. And good seldom comes of that.
My suggestion of breakfast or a dinner was flippant, but I am warming to the idea. EG would happily play host to a gathering – at one of Johnson’s restaurants or elsewhere – because solutions are desperately needed. They may even already exist.
Westfield – and other landlords – have enough international experience to draw upon, while Johnson and Portas have CVs as long as the list of problems that need solving. For the government, meanwhile, it’s a no brainer. The Portas Review has been a PR success; it can be a real one too if momentum is maintained.
Who’s in?
