The high street you knew has gone forever

Clamping down on bookies and vape shops is not going to save it

Bad news for all the people queuing up to open a betting shop in Burnham’s Britain. The Prime Minister is going to give local authorities more power to stop bookies and amusement arcades opening by abolishing ‘aim to permit’, an element of the 2005 Gambling Act which prevents local politicians from stopping a gambling company from operating just because they happen to disapprove of gambling.

In one sense, ‘aim to permit’ has never been more necessary. There are far too many puritanical, low-grade politicians who want to ban everything and they need reining in. In another sense, ‘aim to permit’ has never been less relevant because taxes and regulation have already stubbed out any prospect of growth in the sector.

Dawn Butler MP says: “We have to stop this ridiculous proliferation of betting shops and adult gaming centres”. But as you can see from the graphs below (using data from the Gambling Commission), the idea that there has been a “proliferation” of either is laughable.

Data from the Gambling Commission

The number of bookies has been in free-fall since fixed-odds betting terminals were effectively banned in 2019 and hundreds more are closing their doors this year thanks to the sharp hike in gambling taxes announced by Rachel Reeves last year. In both cases, the anti-gambling campaigners who lobbied for these changes insisted that there would not be significant shop closures as a result.

As for Adult Gaming Centres (AKA amusement arcades), there are still fewer of them than before the pandemic when their numbers were at a record low.

The idea that there has been unchecked growth in the betting sector is so preposterous than the Gambling Commission has taken the highly unusual step of defending the industry it regulates. This is one for the scrap books.

The British Gambling Commission rejected the suggestion that betting shops were spreading unchecked as “simply wrong” and criticised the government for lumping together “highly regulated, licensed” betting shops with rogue or criminal businesses.

“Betting shop numbers have fallen by over a third since 2019. Around 3,000 shops have closed and over 15,000 jobs have already been lost,” it said.

If the proliferation of bricks-and-mortars gambling premises is a figment of the political class’s imagination, the proliferation of vape shops and barbers is very real and there is no doubt that some of them are being used for money-laundering and other forms of poor behaviour. As the BBC says:

BBC News has exposed organised crime on high streets across the country, revealing shops selling illegal cigarettes and vapes, selling cannabis and cocaine, enabling illegal working and suspected money-laundering.

This is all highly illegal and yet it feels like the BBC has been doing more to catch the criminals than the authorities have. The inability of the British state to enforce the law even when law-breaking is going on in plain sight is one of the more obvious symptoms of this country’s decline.

Burnham’s answer is to create more laws. He wants local authorities to be able to be give the go ahead before a new hairdressers or vape shop is allowed to open. The details have not been published, but it is going to be difficult to define a vape shop (as opposed to a shop that sells vapes) and if the policy successfully prevents organised crime from using barbers as a front, it is easy to imagine them switching to coffee shops, bars and other retailers instead.

Yes, the authorities should have more power and resources to shut down illegal operators, but Keir Starmer gave them that in June. A government that was serious about tackling “dodgy vape shops” would not be slapping a £3.60 £2.64 tax on a £3 bottle of vape juice, as it will be doing in October. A government that was serious about helping legitimate retailers wouldn’t be planning to introduce a display ban and plain packaging for e-cigarettes, nor would it be planning a double tax rise on tobacco.

There is a more general point here. The high street as you knew it is gone forever. Burnham says that “for many people, the high streets they grew up with have become unrecognisable” and that “the rise of vape shops, betting shops and rogue operators have replaced the shops, services, and community spaces that people are crying out for.”

This confuses cause with effect. Internet shopping (and, before that, supermarket shopping) has killed off many shops and they are not coming back. On the contrary, the closures will continue until the only businesses on the high street will be for things that people have to do in person, e.g. having a pint and having a haircut. A few pharmacies will survive, along with convenience stores and the odd butcher and grocer. Secondhand shops and antique shops could keep going, but the days of the high street being full of banks and shops selling books, electronics, newspapers and games are over.

As we have seen, there has been no “rise of betting shops”. If there is a perception that there are more betting shops it is because high street rents collapsed and bookies came out of the side streets and became more visible to middle class observers. Charity shops proliferated for the same reason (and because they get a huge discount on business rates). Why did rents fall? Because demand fell. There aren’t enough businesses to fill the high street any more. You can blame taxation and regulation - and they certainly aren’t helping - but social change is the underlying reason. The British public had the choice between using it and losing it, and they chose to lose it.

The idea that the high street can be revived by killing off the few remaining businesses that are able to operate on it is just silly. These companies are not taking up shopfronts that WH Smith (now TG Jones!) is desperate to use. They are on the high street because WH Smith has gone.

The high street of the future will have fewer shops and those shops will be devoted to services - pubs, coffee shops, key-cutters, ice cream parlours, repair shops, cafés and, yes, barbers. The rest should be turned into residential housing.