00:00and how do we find a new one and worth remembering there were two-thirds of properties in town
00:07centres are not associated with retail so even though clearly the business model of retail has
00:12been enormously disrupted first by supermarkets and you know enormously a huge impact on the
00:18shops that we all remember but also obviously online shopping and crucially out of town topic
00:24shopping now all of those things and you throw the covid pandemic in the mix which shuts a number
00:29of businesses that haven't reopened and that's where you have the the fundamental cause of the
00:36problem that we're trying to grapple with and I haven't heard much from anyone in this debate to
00:41address those fundamental economic issues other than things like free car parking which has been
00:46debated for years there's very little evidence to show its efficacy and what we've what we are seeing
00:53is uh out of town sheds with uh large amounts of land dedicated to cars which is untaxed and we have
01:01an unfair uh uh an unlevel playing field and simply making car parking in town centres free not only
01:09denudes local authority of revenue it doesn't address the 25 percent of people who don't have access to a
01:15car uh but simply compounds the problem and then flowing from that we've seen the way that uh the
01:22planning system and businesses have put their investments so it is much cheaper for a business
01:27to build an out of town shed than it is to redevelop a town centre property so then you have
01:32uh an incentive there we see uh the volume house builders building large estates at edge of town
01:40development so people are driving uh to and from them and these houses and the the neighborhoods around
01:46the town centers are becoming places where lower income uh households live and so the shops that
01:53remain in town centers that tend to cater uh for them which is then uh often not in attracting in
01:59families uh who are now living on the edge of towns and they're going to out of town uh retail
02:04development so again none of these are easily solved but they can be addressed through coordination
02:12as predera griffith mentioned dylan jones evans work here the coordination of effort is critical
02:18and the work that professor carol williams did in his report uh for the welsh government small towns
02:23big issues by the uh financial economy research group looked at bangor haford west and bridgeend at how
02:31some of these things uh can be improved uh and the example of bangor for example uh where i spent uh some
02:38time is a really good example of of disjointed agency at the moment so there we had the example
02:44of the fe college moving from the town center to park manine out of town development uh because the
02:52welsh government's economy department gave them a free building the welsh government's education
02:57department paid for them to upgrade it and then the town center team was scratching their head saying
03:02why are they leaving the town center so that's some of the things that we've been going on and
03:07actually a long-term plan where all the agencies including fe housing universities all the different
03:14public sector bodies and the private sector say well what buildings are going to be coming into
03:19falling out of use in the next decade how can we get more housing in town centers how can we create
03:26a different offer that attracts people in because the world as we knew it has gone and simply abolishing
03:31business rates or providing free car parking is not going to bring it back it's a far more complex
03:36tapestry we require than that and i'm afraid our rather glib debate on these things uh is getting us
03:42nowhere uh but but the the the the fix is much more complex and involves far more partners in a granular
03:50way than many of the solutions in this debate offered suggests yeah helen fachan the actor pwylowydd and if i may start
04:00with
04:01with
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