Burnham Pledges £210m to Reopen Boarded-Up High Streets
The Prime Minister will announce £210m for high streets: £125m for councils to tackle derelict buildings, £65m for communities to rescue at-risk pubs and clubs, and £20m split between co-operative ownership and council-run rental auctions. The money is redirected from existing regeneration budgets and sits on top of the £5.8bn pride-in-place programme. “People don’t measure growth by looking at a spreadsheet,” he said. “They measure it by looking at their local high street. Are shops opening or are the shutters down?”
The quote is the strategy: a government whose macroeconomic numbers are poor, offering voters a metric they can see from the bus. On the substance, £210m redirected rather than new is modest against the scale of empty units, and the co-operative element is the one genuinely novel piece — Labour pledged to double co-operatives, and the number grew by 0.4% last year to 8,005, which is not doubling. The pride-in-place programme behind it is the real money, giving 284 communities up to £2m a year for a decade. A full high streets strategy is promised later this year, which is where business rates, the actual lever, would have to appear. Watch whether the strategy arrives before the Budget or after it.