city centre management company

Last year there was an almighty row, aided and abetted of course by politicians taking opportunist (but unrealistic and possibly illegal) positions ahead of elections, about huge rent rises in the five year Covered Market rent review process. A modicum of peace was restored when the city council pledged to spend the paltry sum of £50,000 on some painting and decorating. Today we learn that the cash strapped spending slashing council has withdrawn the funding and, quite rightly, some of the traders in the market are pretty pissed off.

Image copryright SteveBell @ Flickr (I hope I'm allowed to use this!) Not only that, but today we also learned that retail property is at the head of the rush downwards with average values now below those when the rent review period began in 2003. So not only has the council managed to snag peak of the market rents but has now slashed the only sop to the traders it offered.

It's time to realize that the City Council is incapable of being a good landlord to such a sensitive building and it local trader tenants. For many people in Oxford the Covered Market is the jewel in the crown of local retailing. Many suburban centers have lost their fresh food outlets- butchers, green-grocers and so on - and on top of that the market can offer a range of products that only the center of gravity of a city could realistically support.

Whether the Westgate redevelopment goes ahead and when is also critical, as that will move the center of gravity of the city westwards, alongside the redevelopment of the whole south western quarter of the city, and the Covered Market and the surrounding streets need their landlords to plan investment now to try to maintain footfall at that end of the city center when the time comes. It will be a fair trek on foot between Waitrose and the new car parking attached to the Westgate center and the High Street, and the further reduction in scheduled bus services stopping in the High will make things even worse.

Instead of reining in its expenditure on its estate, which is largely to the east of St Aldate's and Cornmarket - the area that will be most affected by these changes over the next few years - the City Council needs to find a way of taking the lead in investing in this part of town. We all know they cannot afford to do so themselves in the current climate as they are slashing away at any expenditure they can so they need to change the way their interests in these properties are handled so that they can attract outside investment.

A Property Investment Partnership would fit the bill. The City Council, and any other landlords who want to participate to keep their estate's value up when all the changes happen, contribute the properties as owner partners, the tenants put in their rent as occupier partners and we go out and find an investor partner or several to put in whatever capital is required.

Ownership is not ceded to anyone else in the long run, the new facilities improve footfall and therefore takings, which is reflected in a higher yield from the whole development, since traders' occupation payments are based on their turnover rather than mere "rent" changing that from a fixed cost to a variable cost at this time of great pressure on retail. Everyone wins. You could even throw in other facilities such as a customer loyalty card, selling small shares to the customers so they also become partners in the thing they value so highly.

Let's face it, the city has finally realized it cannot possibly finance its leisure centers properly and has now given them away in a U-turn since castigating me for suggesting it in 2002 (which would have saved them millions over those years, enough to finance all the projects they are slashing to make ends meet today). So it has no excuse now for not looking at more imaginative ways of dealing with the rest of its non-core operations. And failure to invest now risks their long term future income faced with all the challenges I've already mentioned - which would surely be, foreseeable as it is, maladministration if it comes to pass.

Oxford City Council is set, it would appear, to cut its funding for the City Centre Management Company, OX1 and "repatriate" many of its functions to the bureaucracy of the City Council. In another U-turn from its former support of the idea of a city centre management company the Labour administration thinks that it will be more "transparent" if things are run from the Town Hall again.

New manager 'set to run Oxford' OX1 is to continue as an independent representative body for businesses Oxford city centre is to have a new manager to oversee improvements designed to benefit residents, shoppers, visitors and businesses. Currently £105,000 goes to a company called OX1, a group representing firms which organised events this year to promote the city centre. [From BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | New manager 'set to run Oxford']

When they first pushed the idea back in 1999 I was fundamentally against establishing OX1 as a sort of a "closed shop" of retailers and other economic interests and wanted a much more open structure which would enable users of the city centre, workers, shoppers, citizens, culture groups and so on to take a real stake. I proposed then what I called a "City Centre Management Co-operative".

But in any case, OX1 has never been given the clout or profile it would need to do a decent job. Indeed it has at times become the excuse for a city council not investing in the centre - such as this year when the Christmas lights underwhelmed it was pointed out that it was not the council's job - that it funded OX1 to do that sort of thing (funding which, it would appear, is less than half what the council itself spent on lights ten years ago). Indeed privatizing the provision of Christmas lights was one of the leading drivers behind the CCMC in the first place - we were told that by giving it independence from the council's financial strictures it would be able to produce better investment is such promotional activities.

Oxford city centre is a confusing enough place as it is - not only is the city council responsible for all sorts of statutory administravia, but it is also a significant landlord in its own right. There are competing pressures for its meagre resources there too - it will make a lot of money out of the redevelopment of the Westgate shopping centre if that continues but will likely in turn lose out on its properties in parts of the centre that will lose footfall - such as the High Street, Covered Market and Broad Street areas.

Perhaps more than most other city centres there are powerful local interests outside the city council - the university and colleges own much of the commercial property, as well as, in a sense, "controlling" much of the consumer side of the city's commercial scene. The county council is not such a significant landlord but does control the access in the form of responsibility for roads, traffic and public transport. So there are real conflicts of interest here that could do with sorting out, rather than, perhaps, exacerbating by re-centralizing more of the administrative functions into the city council. And on top of all that, the city council has been utterly incompetent in its execution of the services it provides in the city centre as well - street cleaning, rubbish collection and so on.

So what is needed is to look again at my original idea of a city centre partnership or co-operative in which all users and providers in the city centre can participate and take a real stake. And all the more so in this frightening time when the economic situation may see our high streets decimated with both chain stores and local traders under real threat of closure.

Landlords could be persuaded (led by the city council itself whose investment ability is hopeless anyway) to put their properties (including, perhaps especially, the Covered Market) into such a partnership, allowing finance to be raised for improvements and changing the rent structure which currently threatens to cripple many businesses, especially the local traders. Traders are also not going to survive without customers, so city centre users could be encouraged to join in solidarity with the business they will no doubt regret losing if they go, with perhaps some kind of city centre dividend paid for out of improved revenues from the resultant customer loyalty.

Oxford city centre is a centre for people from throughout the county and region, who have just as little a say in how things are managed there by the city council as do the businesses OX1 was initially setup to represent. Mutualizing the city centre in such a partnership would enable all of these people, as well as Oxford residents to have a real stake and a real say in how their city centre serves them.

It comes as little surprise to me personally that businesses in Oxford City Centre have voted not to pay an extra one per cent on their rates to create a "Business Improvement District":

And who can blame them when the basic standard of cleanliness in the city centre is currently appalling. Here's a photo I took on Saturday of an overflowing and hanging off bin attached to one of their £30,000 benches. Every other bin I saw in the city was full and many were overflowing, but that was the worst. This was early afternoon on a Saturday, the main shopping day, in a city that attracts millions of visitors a year and the place is heaving on a Saturday.

But when I was on the council, and was involved in economic development when the OX1 City Centre Management Company was established, I wanted it to be more wide-ranging than just the "corporateization" of the city centre. I wanted to create a multi-membership co-operative type organization that would involve the users of the city centre as well as the businesses and other stakeholders such as landowners.

Something does need to be done about the city centre, especially the area that will be economically depressed when the new Westgate Centre opens up attracting more and more people to the western end of the city. Although the city council are also landowners of the Westgate Centre, or most of it at least, they also own a significant number of business premises, including the Covered Market and shops in both the High and the Broad, in this eastern end of the city centre. They need to get together with the other landowners in that end of town and ensure that it remains an economically attractive place to do business.

But in the meantime I shall be writing to Mr O'Dell about my idea presently.