'Save our high streets': retail chiefs demand action from SNP ministers

SCOTLAND'S high street bosses are to hold urgent talks with the newly installed SNP government to persuade it to launch a campaign to save the country's ailing high streets.

The move comes in the wake of last week's announcement that self-styled shop queen Mary Portas will head an independent review into the sector for the coalition government.

Her recommendations to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills later this autumn will apply to England and Wales, but Scotland is expected to take a keen interest in her findings.

High street retailers across the UK have come under pressure from lower consumer spending, the rise of internet shopping and fierce competition from out-of-town parks, leaving as much as one third of all shop fronts boarded up in certain towns.

While Scotland as a whole has fared better than the UK, the impact in some areas has been far more dramatic than in others. Those particularly affected include many mid-sized Central Belt towns. For example Hamilton, to the south-east of Glasgow, currently has a high street vacancy rate of 26 per cent.

The centres in more remote communities where major retailers have set up on the edge of town have also suffered.

Fiona Moriarty, director of the Scottish Retail Consortium, said she plans to meet ministers in the coming weeks in an effort to establish a retail policy framework to support the whole of the sector. This would include a high street review to assess the state of the country's town and city centres.

"It is about developing a partnership action plan to look at some of these tough issues," Moriarty said. "We are all in the same place on this issue, we just need to get around the table and discuss things through."

Leigh Sparks, professor of retail studies at the University of Stirling's school of management, said the 60m cross-party Town Centre Regeneration Fund established in the last parliament was just a "drop in the ocean" compared with what is needed to fully revitalise Scotland's town centres.

However, it showed there is the political will across all parties to address these issues.

"The question now is how do we take that forward," he said. "There is more that needs to be done."

Tom Moore, Aberdeen city centre manager, said urgent intervention was required from both government and the property industry to address the decline of the high street.

"The onslaught of the out-of-towns and edge-of-towns is continuing unabated, despite all the lofty words from London and Edinburgh," Moore said. "It is action, not words, that we need now."

As part of First Minister Alex Salmond's Cabinet reshuffle, it was announced last week that Nicola Sturgeon will take on a "cities strategy" role in addition to her health and wellbeing portfolio.