If good shops are available people will use them.
I think we need the government to look at how retail works and what shoppers actually want.
There's not much local shops can do about the long tail but we need to stop penalising them and allowing online retailers to compete on tax avoidance.
So unless your "convicing" is a serious eufimism for fairy drastic emforcement, the plan is doomed.
The preconditions to the type of homogenious high trust environment that is required for this to scale is very fictional at the moment. But I would commend you for trying.
isn’t that a great lever then?
The problem with the British high street is that, in the long run, nobody is going to keep visiting the umpteenth independent café serving acidic coffee at £5 a cup, or the minimarket selling the same cheap tat I could buy on Temu for a third of the price.
You compete with Amazon on quality or selling an experience.
In many cases you can’t even find out who owns a given property. There’s too many shell companies involved.
They don’t care if shops are occupied, they care about the rated resale value.
Business tax rates are based on property values. There is no chance the property companies will reduce the value of their property portfolio to reduce burden for tenants they don’t care about.