The whole issue of proliferation of particular types of shop in an area - particularly betting shops and payday loan merchants - has been highlighted by both Labour and Conservative politicians recently, so it could be that there will be some welcome changes to the law, which currently doesn't seem to give local councils much power to intervene.
Ed Miliband's local election campaign speech on 8th April contained a call to give councils powers "so that local people can have a say about which type of shops they want to see and which they don’t" and implied that a future Labour government would do this. See this
New Statesman
article.
Closer to home, Conservative MP
David Burrowes
is quoted as saying that Enfield Council needs to "get some teeth when it comes to considering these applications and getting an Article 4 direction would be a good start".
"Article 4" directions can be used to force developers to apply for planning permission in cases where it would not normally be required, but central government would only agree to an Article 4 direction "in exceptional circumstances" in order to prevent "harm" to "local amenity". Unfortunately, there is nothing in in the guidelines
Guidelines
issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government that would suggest that Enfield Council woud have a sufficiently strong case for an Article 4 direction.
Bowes and Bounds United
recently drew attention to a Twitter spat between Burrowes and Labour councillor Alan Sitkin, which produced more heat than light, but at least showed agreement about the objective of reining back this kind of proliferation.
On the other hand, the
Independent
's deputy economics editor seems to oppose any such moves on the grounds that betting shop numbers are already in decline nationwide and hastening this decline would lead to more empty shopfronts. Meanwhile, the Association of British Bookmakers is resisting a campaign to reduce maximum slot machine stakes, claiming that it would result in national government losing £650 million in tax and local government £60 million in business rates. Whether or not these estimates are realistic, it seems likely that moves to reduce the number of betting shops would reduce both national and local revenues, a factor which could well sway politicians on all sides.
All in all, then, we can't be confident that either the Coalition or Labour would take the necessary steps to stem this flood. So if you have strong feelings, you should make them known, one way of doing so being to answer the survey that David Burrowes recently sent out to his constituents.
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