Recommendation 8

HM Government Acknowledged

We want our town centers and high streets to be thriving, vibrant hubs where people live, shop, use services, and spend their leisure time. The National Planning Policy Framework makes clear that planning policies should support the vitality and viability of town centers, allowing them to grow and diversify. The broad Commercial, Business and Service use class was introduced in September 2020 to support these aims, providing greater flexibility to move between a wider range of high streets uses such as shops, banks, restaurants, gyms, creches, and offices, and to provide for a mix of such uses, without the need for a planning application. Alongside this, we are delivering long-term structural support through a range of interventions, including investment from the £3.6 billion Towns Fund which will support local areas in England to renew and reshape town centers and high streets in a way that improves experience, creates jobs, and ensures future sustainability. The Future High Streets Fund will improve transport access, make use of vacant shops, buy, and bring land forward to support new housing, workspaces, and public realm, and help adapt high streets in response to changes in technology. The £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund will invest in infrastructure that improves everyday life across the UK, including regenerating town centers and high streets, upgrading local transport, and investing in cultural and heritage assets. In addition, measures brought forward through the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill will reinvigorate high streets by making changes to pavement licences permanent and allowing local authorities to tackle the problem of persistently vacant property on high streets and in town centers and empower places to tackle decline by bringing vacant units back into use, through high street rental auctions. The Use Classes Order is a deregulatory tool: grouping together uses into classes and providing that movement between such uses is not development. In order to provide maximum flexibility in support of high streets and town centers, and in common with other use classes, the Commercial, Business and Service use class is not limited in respect of size or location etc, and premises can move freely between uses within that class. The National Planning Policy Framework requires local planning authorities to apply a sequential test to planning applications for main town center uses which are neither in an existing center nor in accordance with an up-to-date plan. However, movement within the Commercial, Business and Service use class does not require an application for planning permission and therefore there is no opportunity to apply a sequential test. To do so would add planning process where currently there is none, and reduce the flexibility currently afforded on the high street. The recent consultation on reforms to national planning policy noted that we propose, as part of a broader update, to review the approach to town center and out-of- center development in the light of the use class changes. The right provides for protection in respect of health centers and children nurseries, through local consideration of prior approval of the impact of loss on the provision of such local services. Communities will benefit from the delivery of new homes that meet nationally described space standards, and from their local centers being able to diversify and avoid the empty buildings that can add to blight.