Welsh Government wants to “reverse the trend” of services and shops moving out of Welsh town centres to help with a major revival.
Deputy Minister for Climate Change Lee Waters says town centres in Wales had been “hammered” by the explosion in out of town development with supermarkets and other shops and services pulling customers away from high streets.
This has been exacerbated by the pandemic - leaving some town centres “feeling like sad places” according to the minister.
But he said that the Welsh Government now needed to work in “an alliance” with other public organisations and the private sector to reverse this trend.
The aim was to make it easier to bring or retain services in town centres than it is to develop outside of them - something he says has not happened up to this point.
As well as regenerating town centres he believes this will support the climate change ambitions by making it easier for people to live their lives without always having to get in a car.
They will learn from and implement recommendations from Professor Karel Williams’ report ‘Small Towns, Big Issues’ and ‘Regenerating Town Centres in Wales’, prepared by Audit Wales.
Specific recommendations for both Welsh Government and for local authorities include everything from access to public transport and effective promotion of town centres to the simplification of funding streams.
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Welsh Government will also make an additional £5m of loan funding available as part of Transforming Towns this financial year.
The minster, who was visiting Bangor and Rhyl, said: “It is very difficult to reverse what has happened.
“The market moves fast and the process of government can more slowly but we do think the long term trend is starting to change.
“In recent years the growth of supermarkets has hammered town centres, selling everything that would have been sold in town centres. For example the Tesco in Bangor attracts 10m shoppers a year, people that could have used a town centre.”
The situation has been compounded by Covid-19 with high streets in places like Colwyn Bay and Bangor hit by store closures.
Mr Waters added: “It has left town centres feeling like sad places in some examples. We now need to create an alliance for change, not just government, but in Bangor we need the university, health board, housing associations, all on board.
“We need to bring them together with a town centre first principle for services.”
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Citing the example of Coleg Menai’s plan to ditch Bangor city centre for a business park on its outskirts, he added: “We still have people acting in different ways, lots of forces moving the wrong way.”
He accepted it was a challenge and that the first aim was to “stop making it worse” and then they could look at “reversing the trend” by making it harder to locate at out of town locations than it is to be based in a town centre.
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