Promoting and enhancing best practice and technical expertise

CPO Talking Heads: March

Town Centre Regeneration: Ideas into Delivery 

This event runs as an informal discussion with a small panel of leading and informed practitioners extracting the nuances from this monthly topic. They discuss practical issues that arise, with participants in the meeting being encouraged to listen, join in, ask questions and share comments.

Module Duration: 1 hour 3 minutes

Recorded: 09/03/22

Areas covered

Many of our towns and cities were mapped out many centuries ago, and their future is a matter of heightened concern, particularly given the pandemic and the recent trends in retail. Indeed supporting high streets has been cited as a key part of the Government's "levelling up" agenda. Retail is not the only activity in town centres and there is a need to find new uses for surplus office space. How do we make our town centres and high streets viable again? The House of Commons library has published a research briefing on Town Centre Regeneration, and we are probably all agreed that focused regeneration can support our town centres and high streets into thriving places to work, visit and live, but no change is possible without access and control of the land. Such structural change will often require the use of compulsory purchase powers. 

  • What are the High streets and town centres trends and challenges?
  • How are the challenges being addressed through regeneration initiatives and what sort of town centre schemes are in vogue?
  • What are the challenges with promoting a CPO for town centre regeneration?
  • With changes in behaviours and habits from the impact of COVID, can it be argued that town centre schemes are un-necessary or have a greater hurdle to climb with proving that there is a reasonable prospect of a scheme coming to fruition?
  • What are the opportunities of making use of CPO powers and maximising the benefits of the scheme through integration with transport schemes?

March's Talking Heads