Why Plans for Towns are suddenly all the rage.

After years of resistance, there’s now a growing acceptance that towns need to develop long-term plans to revive their fortunes. But where do you start to get your place plans right?

Over 10 years ago in the first ‘Grimsey Review’ of 2013, the veteran retailer Bill Grimsey argued that all towns should be developing a 20-year vision supported by a broad business plan in five year chunks. At the time, it was dismissed by government ministers as ‘not realistic’, but Grimsey persisted and was encouraged when he saw a Belgian mayor adopt his idea.  

He was invited to see Kris Declercq, the mayor of Roeselare, announce his long-term plan at a packed public meeting in Belgium, bringing in sweeping changes to bring in town centre housing, fine landlords that left shops empty and map a shift away from being solely reliant on retail. One after one, local councillors climbed onto the stage to sign their support for the Mayor’s plan.

Slowly but surely the idea continued to gather momentum and in 2021 MPs on the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee issued a report arguing that the Government should publish an annual list of which areas had strategies for their town centres and when they were last updated. 

Finally, the penny dropped and in October 2023, the UK Government announced a new Long Term Plan for Towns (LTPT) initiative. The LTPT outlined a new, locally-led approach to regeneration, tackling issues such as empty shops, crime, inequality and a lack of pride in place. 

By creating Town Boards that bring together a wide range of stakeholders and undertaking extensive local consultation, towns will develop Local Plans that address issues at the heart of their communities with secured funding over a ten-year period. 

How To Get the Best From This Approach

The High Streets Taskforce has published clear evidence showing that towns with strong local leadership partnerships and cross-sector collaborations have been the most successful at driving long-term positive change in their communities. Town Boards are a good vehicle for this, often spearheaded by the Local Authority, but requiring a broad and representative range of voices from the community. 

Town plans need to take a new approach, one that focuses on a wide variety of community-led initiatives that have meaningful impacts on people’s lives, address specific issues that local people care about, and create an environment for future growth and development. Intervention areas could include education and skills, local economy and high streets, sustainability and net-zero, youth provision, the development of community assets, transport schemes and empowering community-service providers. 

Schemes should be locally led and come from the people they will most impact. Whether it’s developing a community orchard, cider press and wassailing in Cornwall or a skills strategy in Wigan to enable food manufacturing workers to take on more high skilled roles, this is about realising local strengths and unlocking the distinctive potential of every town in the UK. 

Importantly, interventions should be outcome-based, outlining a clear vision that goes beyond the generic statements littered across most master planning documents. 

The Next Steps For Towns

The LTPT seeks to embed this approach into legislation, initially identifying 55 towns to receive £20 million endowment funding to be delivered over ten years in line with locally developed Town Plans. An additional 20 towns were added to the list in the Spring Budget, with beneficiaries now in the process of selecting town boards and unlocking capacity funding to begin to progress their plans. 

However, for the other 988 towns in the UK who do not currently have a multimillion pound funding package, this approach should not be ignored. 

Developing vibrant places is not just a major driver of civic pride. Recent research shows a key post-pandemic trend, largely driven by increased homeworking, is that the battleground for talent is moving from beyond the corporation to the places people choose to live. In other words, placemaking is going to become increasingly more important for economic development.  

And with the Labour Party also recently committing to more devolution and local growth plans to support towns, it would seem that getting place plans right is going to be the holy grail for regeneration in the coming years. 

Reimagine Place - Supporting Towns

For those at the start of this journey, help is at hand. Our multidisciplinary team has experience of developing town plans and is committed to delivering bottom-up, community-led regeneration. We combine extensive engagement and consultation, detailed data analytics and industry experience to create actionable, measurable interventions to improve towns and communities. 

We work with a wide range of partners ranging from Councils, Town Teams, BIDs and CICs to health bodies, police and housing associations to develop and execute these plans, explore funding opportunities and establish place leadership bodies that are representative of local stakeholders and well-positioned to apply for and secure funding. 

Whether you want a fully managed process, support with areas in which your organisation is under resourced, or just a conversation, get in touch today.