We must fire up our spirit of invention to transform Britain
WE still are a nation of shopkeepers – and shoppers – and it’s great news to see doors opening on large and small retailers across the country from next month. For the past 200 years, Britain has been an innovator in retail and our entrepreneurial spirit is most often expressed through what we sell.
Shopping arcades, canned food, department stores – all were pioneered in Britain. Making and selling is what we do best and the Government is right to keep this flame of enterprise alive and well with grants and loans.
Retail is Britain’s biggest employer with three million jobs depending on its success. Last year, it generated £394billion of sales – a third of all consumer spending – through more than 300,000 shops and stores. That’s five per cent of our total GDP.
But we must be realistic too. High streets will never be exactly the same again. Coronavirus has only hastened a change in our shopping habits already forced by the internet and web retailers.
In the past Britons have shown they can revolutionise the way we shop and we must do that again. When Burlington Arcade opened just over 200 years ago in 1818 in London’s Piccadilly, it was one of the first covered shopping streets in Europe and well-heeled customers flocked to it. Innovation combined with clever marketing is just the right recipe for generating wealth.
HIGH streets today need to transform the way they sell. Shops must become community hubs, offering services and links within the neighbourhood as well as providing goods. They need to be fun places, hosting spaces for entertainment, events, food and drink.Why not meet friends for clothes shopping one evening, have a drink and bite to eat in the same place and listen to some live music?
But if entrepreneurs are to be encouraged to transform retail then the Government must play its part as well. Sky-high business rates are no longer justified, giving online retailers an unfair advantage. If we want our high streets to thrive in order to boost the economy and our mental well-being, then rents and rates must be much more realistically priced.
Banks must deliver on their role too, lending the money to start-ups who will provide tomorrow’s jobs. The Government-owned British Business
Bank has shown the way with its enormously popular bounceback loan scheme (BBLS). Within a fortnight of its launch, £14.2billion had been lent to 464,393 small businesses.
Commercial banks have been less enthusiastic. Of course, no one expects banks to be reckless with their lending and there are fears that the BBLS may be vulnerable to fraud. But now more than ever, cash flow is important for keeping shops and businesses going.
Banks must never forget that taxpayers bailed them out in the 2008 financial crisis, now they need to support the rest of the business community with the same determination. It has been predicted the UK economy could shrink by 35 per cent this year with job losses of two million.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was elected on the promise of levelling up Britain by creating more jobs across the entire UK.
Faced with the present economic crisis, he needs to turbocharge those plans even more now, using taxpayers’ money to stimulate our economy in the right way by bringing home more jobs from abroad and revolutionising our communication and transport infrastructure. Faster internet and faster trains.
We have a national talent for research and development but too often allow finished products to be made overseas. This might have made economic sense at one time but not anymore.
IT IS a shocking fact that 50 per cent of our medical ingredients come from China and most of our generic drugs are made in India.
Sir James Dyson is the UK’s richest person and is scathing of this attitude. “As a nation we don’t value engineering and science, or businesses that try to exploit those things,” he says. “Let’s embrace education, engineering, commerce, free up planning permission and make things again.”
The key lesson to learn from billionaire Dyson is that it is one thing to invent a worldbeating device but it is equally important to cultivate the skills to sell it internationally.
Making and selling is what made this country great and if we are to survive the economic shocks of coronavirus we must fire up that spirit again.
We were once the workshop of the world and the Great Exhibition of 1851 celebrated that national pride. When the worst of this pandemic is past, Boris Johnson is right to want to inaugurate a new great exhibition that demonstrates we still are one of the best manufacturers and retailers in the world.
‘For high streets to thrive rents and rates must be realistic’