Concurrent Committee of the Committee for the Executive Office, Committee for Finance and Committee for the Economy OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) High Street Task Force: The Executive Office; Department for Communities 16 June 2021 NORTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY Concurrent Committee of the Committee for the Executive Office, Committee for Finance and Committee for the Economy High Street Task Force: The Executive Office; Department for Communities 16 June 2021 Members present for all or part of the proceedings: Mr Colin McGrath (Chairperson) Dr Caoimhe Archibald (Deputy Chairperson) Ms Martina Anderson Mr Keith Buchanan Mr Pat Catney Ms Jemma Dolan Mr Maolíosa McHugh Ms Sinead McLaughlin Mr Mike Nesbitt Mr John O'Dowd Mr Matthew O'Toole Mr George Robinson Mr Pat Sheehan Ms Emma Sheerin Mr Jim Wells Witnesses: Mr Mark O'Donnell Department for Communities Mr Chris Stewart The Executive Office The Chairperson (Mr McGrath): With us is Chris Stewart from the Executive Office. He has the grand title of deputy secretary of strategic policy, equality and good relations. Given the cross-cutting nature of the task force, we are also joined by Mark O’Donnell from the Department for Communities. You will be pleased to know that we could not fit in a fourth Committee, so we do not have any representatives from the Communities Committee. However, we know that the task force cuts across to some of its workload as well. Chris, we will allow you to give us some form of input, and we will move to questioning after that. I hand over to you. Mr Chris Stewart (The Executive Office): Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, members. Chair, if it meets with your approval, I will begin and remind members of the background to the development of the high street task force. I will then hand over to Mark to say a bit more about the current state of play. In doing that, we will touch on why we are a form of a double act for the task force and why it is important that there is very close working between our Departments on it. 1 Members will recall that the high street task force was first announced in September last year. That announcement was very much made in the context of COVID recovery. However, as we will go on to say, the focus of the task force's work is very much on issues that predate COVID and that will, unfortunately, most probably long outlast it. Following the announcement, there was some early engagement, at official level, with the English, Scottish and Welsh task forces or equivalent bodies and some subsequent engagement with local stakeholders. Those stakeholders included Retail NI, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Hospitality Ulster, the Institute of Directors, the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA), the Northern Ireland Local Government Association (NILGA,) Belfast City Council and the Northern Ireland Committee, Irish Congress of Trade Unions (NICICTU). It was a broad spread, and I am very grateful to colleagues from all those organisations for giving very generously of their time in that process. One of the most pleasing and, perhaps, unusual things about that very broad engagement was the very high degree of consensus among those stakeholders on the issues that needed to be addressed. There was common recognition that our town and city centres face a very broad range of economic and social challenges and that, whilst the COVID pandemic has undoubtedly exacerbated those challenges, as I said, many of them are long-standing and stem from things such as the financial crisis of 2009, prolonged underinvestment in infrastructure and, of course, changing patterns of consumer behaviour. We have all seen some very significant examples of disappointing retail announcements over the last year. There was a very broad consensus among stakeholders that those challenges call for a strategic response, with Departments, stakeholders and local government working in partnership to deliver a vision for sustainable town and city centres as thriving and sustainable hubs for retail, services, hospitality and the residential sector; much more of a mixed economy than perhaps the typical concept of a high street. Looking at established practice elsewhere and at the other task forces, we see that a number of elements were common to their success. Those include having a long-term vision with a strategic approach to delivery; having an emphasis on local civic leadership and capacity; having a role in contributing to and influencing policy, with access to Ministers being seen as very important; a role in bringing together a range of new and existing programmes and initiatives to increase synergy and efficiency; a role in the production of guidance and best-practice documentation; and a direct role in delivering projects and funding schemes, although the importance of that varies from place to place. Having considered that feedback from stakeholders, Ministers asked that a reference group be established. That comprised most of the stakeholders that I mentioned: Retail NI, Hospitality Ulster, the Business Alliance, NILGA, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and the relevant Departments. That reference group was asked to develop terms of reference for the task force proper, to advise on additional membership, to examine the Scottish, Welsh and English approaches in more detail and to make recommendations to TEO Ministers and the Executive. Ministers provided a number of steers to shape the output of the group. They asked the group to develop a vision for a strategic response to the economic and social challenges that I mentioned, very much reflecting the language that stakeholders had advised on. Ministers suggested that a bespoke approach to the role and function of the task force should be adopted for Northern Ireland but that the Scottish approach should be used as a starting point and template. We will say a bit more about how the thinking around that developed, in due course. Ministers asked that the scope of the task force include all towns and cities but that it not overlap or duplicate the work of the existing city deals initiative. In terms of structure and governance, Ministers asked that the task force be an informal structure — not a creature of statute or a quango — but they said that it should have some formal governance arrangements centred on programme and project management and that it should therefore have a project board chaired by Ministers and including key stakeholders as full project board members so that the emphasis can be on co-design and co-delivery and not merely on consultation. The reference group met four times in fairly rapid succession. I am very grateful to colleagues in the organisations and in other Departments for the time and effort that they put into that. There was a high degree of consensus within the group about what its recommendations should be. I am particularly grateful for the effort that was put in, because it came at a very difficult time for all those organisations, the sectors that they represent and their members. The group provided recommendations to Ministers that built on the initial steer provided by the Ministers. Ministers accepted most of the 2 recommendations. First, Ministers accepted the vision that was suggested by the reference group, which is: "Sustainable city, town and village centres which are thriving places for people to do business, socialise, shop, be creative and use public services as well as being great places to live." Secondly, Ministers considered the five main functions that were recommended by the reference group and accepted them with one important caveat. Those functions are COVID-19 recovery; influencing policy and strategy; developing capacity; developing and promoting good practice; and driving and supporting intervention and investment. The reference group also suggested that those five key functions be underpinned by a number of horizontal integration principles, which include decarbonisation and tackling the climate emergency; sustainable development; integration of the high streets vision with the delivery of programmes across government; and the relevant outcomes of the forthcoming Programme for Government (PFG). The important caveat that I mentioned, which members heard about in the previous session, is that Ministers decided that, given its urgency, the immediate work on COVID recovery, as it relates to the high street, should be taken forward by the existing COVID-19 task force. You have just heard evidence on the work of that group. The thinking behind that was that it will leave the high street task force free to concentrate on longer-term strategic work. The two task forces will, of course, continue to work closely together. The reference group did not recommend any additions to the membership beyond the group itself. However, Ministers considered it very important that the task force should have a broad-based membership that reflects the breadth of the vision for town and city centres that I described, and hence the final membership was broadened considerably from that of the reference group. Partly on foot of that, given the breadth of the task and the size of the membership, in terms of the organisation of the work, four subgroups have been established, one for each of the key functions, and Mark will say a bit more about how they are operating in due course. The task force is chaired jointly by the junior Ministers to pick up the important aspect of having access to Ministers as part of its work. The reference group looked very carefully, as the Ministers suggested, at the existing models in England, Scotland and Wales. Ministers had suggested that the bespoke approach for Northern Ireland should use the Scottish model as a template.