South Holland MP Sir John Hayes says there is a lesson to learn from the demise of Spalding’s Coneys department store

The sad closure of Coneys ‘destructive’ internet shopping and the future of town centres are discussed by MP Sir John Hayes in this week’s column.

Last week, after more than six decades, Spalding’s local department store – recently Coneys, but known by most of us for much longer as Hills – closed its doors to customers.

Between the pandemic, when the shop was previously saved from closure, and subsequent troubles, this landmark of Spalding town centre is trading no longer. Of most concern to me is the store’s longstanding employees, to which end I have contacted the owners, knowing that South Holland District Council have done the same.

Coneys sad demise deprives Spalding, for now, of a department store, in the same way that so many other towns have lost similar bastions of their high streets. Whilst the current cost of living was, perhaps, the final trigger, longer term trends threaten every high street. Most obvious is the boom in destructive internet shopping, as communal life is sacrificed in the name of convenience.

Also significant though is the rise in edge of town facilities or far away huge shopping malls, neither of which contribute meaningfully to our sense of place.

Reader letter: I take no pleasure in being proved right that Springfields would kill town centre

It’s the heart of places that matter most. Communities cohere when they are drawn to a central destination which offers many things to do - shopping, working, and being entertained amongst them.

It is why I choose to maintain an office at the centre of my constituency in Spalding, rather than basing all my staff in London. as some MPs do.

Across Britain, the need for town centre regeneration has become ever clearer since the lockdowns and consequent decline in footfall. To prosper, town centres must counter the growth of internet shopping, with retail accounting for a third of properties on British high streets. Where shops and businesses do fail, it is vital that their premises don’t stand empty for too long, instead being reused, or repurposed.

Ironically, despite the addictive internet, the public say they love to shop in their local area, and so Government must reduce rates, make it easier for people to start small businesses, and use procurement to sustain local family run firms. All of which would help breathe life back into our high streets.

Here in South Holland, I have discussed with Council Leader Nick Worth the urgent need to revitalise our markets, and given the recent success of the restored flower parade, to explore opportunities for more town centre festivals and events.

Nationally, ministers have rightly made supporting high streets a key part of the ‘levelling up’ agenda, setting out a vision to “support the evolution of high streets into thriving places to work, visit and live”. This includes several funding schemes designed to help town centres redevelop and to support local economic growth, as well as the HighStreets Task Force which provides expertise to advise on regeneration. I will work withlocal councillors to direct such support to our area.

Initiatives may include finding new uses for surplus retail or office space, which recognise the changing patterns of use by supporting diversification. Importantly, this must be locally led – appropriate regeneration in Lincolnshire’s towns is clearly going to be very different from designs for places in the London commuter belt, or in large cities more generally.

Given the prevalence of internet shopping, and aware that the ‘genie won’t go back into the bottle’, we should look at an online sales tax to force Amazon and their ilk to give up a fair share of their enormous profits to support our high streets and, in particular, family firms. It is far from unreasonable to expect multinational firms, which benefit from the economies of scale that come with large distribution warehouses, to help support our towns and villages as they struggle to compete with global corporates.

As for Spalding’s long-standing department store, I hope that its valuable premises will be put to good use by someone in the not-too-distant future.

We can all do our bit for own town and village high streets – buying goods from local shops, eating in local restaurants and cafes, and drinking in local pubs are all part of nourishing the health of communities. I know because I do.

The lesson of Coneys is - what you don’t use, you lose.