Coventry City Council vows to 'reclaim high street' from dodgy shops
The council is calling on local communities to help in the fight
Local communities in Coventry have been asked for their help in a fight to “reclaim the high street” from dodgy shops.
Action on rogue retailers is among the priorities that have been agreed by the city council’s Cabinet Member for Community Safety and Cohesion, Cllr John McNicholas.
He wants to see tough frontline enforcement and to crack down on stores where there are suspected to be unlawful sales of vapes and tobacco.
Cllr McNicholas ((Lab, Lower Stoke) said in a report to the Scrutiny Co-ordination Committee this week: “There is growing concern about illegal sales to children, illicit goods and high street premises being exploited by organised crime, undermining legitimate traders and community confidence.”
Cllr Jackie Gardiner (Reform, Sherbourne) told the committee: “These premises set up faster than anybody can actually shut them down, which is part of the problem. And so while there’s limited things that we can do as a council – that’s going to take sorting out legislation and speeding things up in other systems – the existing systems don’t have a hope of making much headway here.
“I just wonder if there is something overall as a council that we could do to increase public pressure and cooperation. As a nation, we can decide that we don’t like this and therefore we don’t buy from there. So is there a means that we can encourage the public to vote with their feet, to try and mitigate some of the pressure while we try to deal with ways to take control of our high street?”
Cllr McNicholas mentioned one shop in Tile Hill that had been closed down four times. He responded: “We do need the help and support of our local communities. There is primary legislation required to challenge such misuse and that will require sitting down with our MPs, talking to Parliament, but that process is in hand.
“We are dealing with it but as usual these things aren’t going to be immediate. In the meantime, we need to encourage local communities to talk to their ward councillors, to me and to the council, about problem shops they know about in their area.”
Cllr Marcus Lapsa (Reform, Tile Hill & Canley) asked the council to ensure it sent a message by publicising all enforced closures and prosecutions. He added that there was no “joining the dots” between central government and the council when dealing with enforcement while ensuring there is tough legislation in place to back it up.
Cllr McNicholas agreed with the issues, adding: “Let’s not forget, because the former government was not giving us the funding we needed, we took out money from budgets in order to keep the council tax down.
“And there was £1m taken out, for example, from the cleaning budget and it’s those sort of issues we’ve got to address.” He said increased funding from the current Labour Government meant the council was starting to tackle the problems, such as by increasing the number of staff to deal with enforcement.
Julie Newman, the council’s Director of Law, Governance and Safer Communities, said: “We spoke about lobbying the government in relation to the length of closure orders. Three months is not that helpful, we probably need a 12-month closure order.
“The other thing we are very keen to lobby the government on is closure orders being against premises. We’d rather they were against individuals, so we can stop the problem just moving on somewhere else. There also needs to be more resourcing nationally around the proceeds of crime.
“I think there’s a lot of lobbying we can do and I’ve spoken to Cllr McNicholas about this and also about West Midlands Combined Authority possibly being a lobbying force for us as well.
“The difficulty is being able to work within those remits. We are doing a lot more organisational disruption, if you like, so that rather than just involving individual officers or individual service areas, we’re looking at how we can do a wider, ward-based impact to disrupt across a lot of different activity.
“But we don’t link in with community people enough so that’s the sort of thing we probably need to start looking at.”
Cllr Lapsa added: “I believe there’s a petition coming to the council asking for 12-month closure orders as opposed to three-month closure orders. So we are aware of the difficulties and that we need more resources.”
He asked the authority to work alongside residents’ associations in organising volunteer members of the public to carry out test purchases at suspect stores in order to gather evidence of illegal items being sold.
Cllr Lapsa said regular and repeated instances of unlawful sales would help to give the council enough evidence for prosecutions.