Labour’s Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities impressed with Mansfield's 'buzzing' town centre

Rachel Reeves and Lisa Nandy visited a number of businesses in the town centre during their visit, along with Mayor Andy Abrahams, to see what innovative initiatives are in place, including the new Mansfield Discover app, which includes information about shopping, eating and drinking in the town, as well as community events and road closures.

Businesses they visited included The Toffee Hut, new jewellery shop, Once Upon a Time, and new bath bomb shop, The Little Lotion Company.

Rachel said: “All around the country, high streets, town centres and shopping centres are struggling and when we spoke to the shopping centre manager here she was saying during the pandemic they lost Debenhams, and Arcadia, and the truth is there is lots of headwinds that are making things really difficult for high streets and shopping centres but we’ve come here to Mansfield because there is innovative stuff happening here to try and turn it around.

“I don’t think anyone is claiming that any town or any city has got all the answers to this because it is really difficult.

"We were chatting to Rachel who runs the Toffee Hut and she said things have changed, people are shopping in different ways but what we were quite inspired about from what’s happening in Mansfield is trying to get independent businesses where it’s worth coming out for.

"Of course you need the high street brands, we don’t want them leaving the high street, but there’s something special about the independent shops.

"We met a wonderful woman who has been in the pop up shop in the shopping centre for a couple of months, originally from Hong Kong and came here two years ago, and she has always had this dream to design and sell her own jewellery and now she’s doing that from what was a vacant unit in the shopping centre.

"That’s a really fantastic story and a high street jeweller pulled out of the shopping centre and now she’s in there.

“When you see the stuff in there you see that you won’t be able to get that anywhere else because it’s really unique and I think that’s what we like about what Andy is trying to do here in Mansfield. Making the shopping centre worth coming to so it’s not just thinking ‘I must use the shopping centre otherwise it won’t be here in the future’ it’s thinking ‘I must use the shopping centre because I can get stuff there that I can’t get online or in any old high street shop, I can only get it here in Mansfield.

"And we saw the same in a bath bomb shop.”

Lisa said: “We’ve seen high streets struggling all over the country and we’re really concerned about the way in which many people are losing the hub of a community.

"We know the high street has a special place for many people and many towns and here in Mansfield Andy is doing some fantastic work with the business community to really turn that trend around.

"Particularly the grants for small start ups, they’ve had one of the best rates of start ups growing into fully fledged businesses in the country.

"In government we want to replicate that and make sure we are tilting the balance back towards brick and mortar businesses so that they can thrive in every part of the country and it’s been a delight to see how much this town centre is buzzing, how positive the businesses are about their partnerships with each other, with the community and with the council, and we want to see more of that.

"There is so much ambition here for what the town centre can be and how much potential there is and what amazing partnerships there are.

"They’ve got the ambition and the community have got the ambition but what they really need is a Government that can match level of ambition for Mansfield, and then imagine what the town centre could be.”

Cost of living crisis

Rachel said: "One of the things a lot of shop owners say to me is that their energy bill has gone up almost six times because there is no cap on energy bills for small businesses and we’ve said that the money the big energy giants are making because of those huge profits at the moment should be used to help small businesses with their bills because a lot of businesses are saying, even if we’ve got people coming through the door we’re not making any money because our costs have gone up and we’re struggling to make ends meet.

"Businesses we have spoken to here in Mansfield have said they are beneffiting from the small business rate relief but this is a temporary scheme and these problems aren’t going away and the Government need to reform the system of business rates and we would in Government and we’ve said how we would do that.

"We think there needs to be a level playing field between the big online retail giants and the high street and small businesses because at the moment you pay more in business rates if you’re a small business than if you are a giant that doesn’t have any high street presence.”

“We know that when high streets are doing well and businesses are doing well people feel proud of their community.

"These places belong to all of us and it brings people together.”

Empty shops

Lisa said: “Empty shops are an issue in every part of the country and we would hand powers to councils to make it much easier for them to take back control of their town centres and to be able to bring those shops back into use.

"Use it or lose it is essentially the message and force landlords and owners to register who actually owns the business with the land registry because at the moment it’svery difficult to trace who actually owns many of those properties.

"The BID manager was telling me that one of the great challenges here in Mansfield is that even where they’ve identified the vacant property they often can’t identify who actually owns it, and these are our town centres, they belong to us in common so we will put that power back into the hands of the community through the council in order to be able to bring them back into use.”

Anti social behaviour

Andy said: "We can have all these initiatives to bring people into the town but if there is still a perception that it’s not a safe place people won’t come.

"We’re trying to address that in Mansfield by giving the police work stations around the town but we haven’t got the numbers and we’d like to have that visible presence to give them confidence.”

Rachel said: “We want to make sure that Mansfield, and other towns, have the police presence that you want and the local community want as well.”

Mansfield Discover app

During their time in Mansfield Rachel and Lisa were introduced to the new Mansfield Discover app.

Lisa: “It’s something that I will be taking back, not just to Wigan, but to all of the town centres that I visit, because right now people need help to increase footfall. Every single business here talked about footfall as being the key to whether businesses can not just thrive, but actually survive, in really tough times, and the app is an incredible innovation.

"I haven’t seen anything like it before, where you can not just ensure people who live in Mansfield spend more time in the town centre, but actually attract people in from outside of Mansfield, to make it a destination place, and that’s the vision that Andy has for Mansfield, and it’s the vision that we have for all of our town centres across Britain.

"If you can open up an app and see different offers that will attract you into a place, that’s the key to unlocking the potential of these businesses.

"It’s been an amazing thing to see.”