High street champion focuses on vacant buildings

Sally Themans said she was looking for ways to revive town centres

A woman who champions high streets says many market towns are being "blighted" by large unoccupied properties that should be brought back into use.

Sally Themans, who runs a consultancy supporting high streets in Shropshire and Staffordshire, said: "Despite all the great regeneration efforts going on around them, [empty properties] are a real problem."

Her organisation organised a seminar in Market Drayton on Thursday to pass on advice to businesses.

She said she was looking at "innovative approaches to revitalising town centres".

Community ownership could be "one of the means to break the deadlock on empty High Street properties", she added.

She mentioned the Wellington Orbit building in Wellington, Shropshire, as an example of a community group taking over the running of a large empty building, with the support of the local authority.

She said large empty buildings were "often poorly maintained" and could "prove a real obstacle to the best efforts of high street regeneration".

She also said in some cases there were "absent landlords who look at these buildings as something on their balance sheets" and the buildings could be expensive to maintain.

But she said some of the more historic buildings could take advantage of "a glitch in the system" which allowed them to avoid business rates and that "they really do help the overall look of any town centre".

The high street champion cites the Orbit building in Wellington as an example of a community group taking over the running of a large vacant building

Ms Themans said delegates at the Markey Drayton seminar would learn about the latest powers given to local authorities to compel landlords to rent out persistently vacant commercial properties.

Vicki Bidwell, policy lead for "High Street Rental Auctions" at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, was due to explain how they work.