Stephen Boyle 
Commercial Property and Town Centres: What Next?
Three propositions:
Large and permanent decline for the type of properties available in town and city centres;
Blight affecting the town and city centres in terms of economic prosperity ;
In order to prevent blight, take advantage of opportunities that are swift substantial and bold.
Decline in demand for certain type of property in town and city centres is not new, but the type of decline is permanent and caused by 3 factors:
Digital technologies that reduce cost of retail and home working;
Health concerns that are impacted this year;
Current recession and prolonged period of unemployment, compressed incomes to spend income in these places.
How does blight occur?
When a significant property has been left in decline for a long period of time that will cast a shadow over an area, and reduce the probability of it being attractive to investors;
Supply can remain fixed for a period of time; it does not respond quick to changes in the economic environment;
Characteristic of ‘elastic’ supply, that it doesn’t take much to impact the value of the property’
Property is classed as an asset, in Scotland and UK, asset owners range from insurance companies, property development and pension funds - each of which works on different forms of regulation and how that value is reported’
Exists on a spectrum of formal professional groups to small scale informal investors’
Large fall in values that we are already see plus different incentives offered to owners gives rise to a reluctant to sell the property assets, to hold onto them to price recovery that gives rise to vacancies that gives rise to blight;
Sustainable fall in property values this year due to COVID, we can see this from annual reports that only capture one week of lockdown, the bigger picture will emerge next year.
What do we do about it?
Scope to act, and act effectively;
Clear plans for places;
Give thought to more extensive use of compulsory purchase orders, compulsory. sales orders and land tax orders.
If we have plans in place, that might be enough to stimulate investor confidence, but other actions need to be in place.
Permanent decline in demand, which may cause blight, but there are things that can be done about.
Panel Perspectives:
Phil Prentice
Hard times ahead but massive opportunities, it is about not getting back to where we were before COVID in terms of thinking. Transformative and radical, climate emergency in background - thinking about climate and sustainability.  
Cities are stalled, but social and economic renaissance in our towns. Harness that properly, and it will give us an opportunity to look at what this might look like in a post-COVID Scotland.
Cities are struggling because nobody is going into the office, students are returning but there is still no massive hospitality or tourism.
There is still a reliance on out of town shopping but there seems to be a return to high street retailing, but this may be because of intervention in time but we could make a use of it moving forward.
There is a need to rebalance quickly, Westminster is looking to transform retail into residential spaces, but I think we need to be careful that we don’t destroy the character of places, we need to consider a place based approach throughout.’
You can’t just flip an office into a home over night.
Climate is a bigger issue than covid.
BIDS resilience fund - but also fund getting the necessary PPE into places, get people safe
Promoting safe and healthy recovery, people are arriving at businesses on foot, connivence stores have benefits through lockdown. Reduced carbon footprint.
Scotland loves Local campaign, working with media outlets like Newsquest, DC Thompson to build on storytelling and positive, good behaviours with our neighbours. Green spaces and being part of the community.
The message will help lead to a stronger recovery, as a pound spend in the community will flip back into the place so you might actually see a quicker recovery by focusing on local - not just buying everything online.
Another fund is on the card soon to help stimulate the economy further.
The long-term plan looks to Town policies - action plan and delivery platform.
People should be able to live work and play within a 20 minutes distance from where they live: The '20-Minute Neighbourhood'
Repopulating public services back into the centre. We need to focus this on local plans. 
There is also the commercial sector for example: e.g. What do we do about shopping centres that are starting to weaken before this?
Emma Mackenzie looks after 33 shopping centres in UK, 4 in Scotland. 24 Retail Parks, 4 in Scotland. 700 pubs and 100 pubs in Scotland. What we are seeing, acceleration of what was happening anyway. Oversupply of retail space for the last 20 years. Continue to build space, build on the outside of town.
The purpose of investment fund is to drive performance from the supplies we have. We have limited exposure to mid-level brand fashion, where much of the carnage is taking place (Jigsaw, All Saints)
Their assets in town centres have alternative use value, so that is what has been important to support the thought process going forward. The issue there has been in retail for the last 20 years is that there has been too much of it. We’ve already worked in town centres to repurpose to gyms, libraries and community space as well as knocking down vacant space - but what we need to focus on quickly is repurposing retail space because the value that is being put on them by the private sector is putting pressure on being able to drive the terms from them.
But in every situation there is a crisis, there is also an opportunity - to be able to do that is to price risk, if you are an expert in the sector and you get to know the businesses and their performances, if they are not successful then the investors will not be successful. So. all businesses in a town are part of an ecosystem, interlinked.
The public sector has the privilege of that leadership role, what will make a difference to the town and understand what it will take make a place a decent and welcoming place to live e.g. education, infrastructure, jobs, green space.
We see a future in curating town centres, because a lot of the retail space will need to be repurposed and that is the opportunity there. Despite the lack of demand for retail, there is demand in other areas - student, private accommodation, gyms and health and wellbeing that will continue to flourish.
The thing that’s come out of the pandemic is that we all have a sense of responsibility to these towns and the community Is going all sorts of jobs we all rely on.  
Working from home, flexible working spaces - and become more local. It was happening anyway; it has generated a way forward. If work life balance is better, and people are happier, it will generate a positive outcome and being in a town that is a positive place to live can only be beneficial.
And if there is to be investment, there needs to be returns, they have to make money. Working with councils across the country to collaborate on the future, where to co-invest and what can simulate a sustainable future.
Neil Rutherford
Response to trends:
⁃      Importance of place, place-based programmes - distributing models, and being able to offer services more locally.
⁃      Role of housing changing. How we build our houses?
⁃      Community wealth building space
⁃      Strong clusters around Scotland, how do we build up them (eg. Tech hubs)
⁃      Infrastructure, town and country - wide definition.
Some plans exists, some need to be revisited.
National, Regional and Local collaboration.
Shona Glenn 
Taking over vacant derelict land. 10000 acres over 300000 sites, that’s an area twice the size of Dundee that vacant derelict land.
Back in 2018, there was a task force to try and address this. Not to fix it but make it easier to bring land back into use but also to stop it emerging in the future.
Given with what is happening with COVID, you don’t need to look far to see what vacant derelict land exists already that could be used rather than building new, and many of these places have been around for years, due to a poor economic and political response to economic and social changes.
Task force will make recommendations on the 1st of October. One focus is to look at how the public sector makes decisions on how it spends its money and what to spend it on.
Intentional decision making, decisions about when a site gets developed or sold is currently being assessed on quite a narrow cost benefit analysis, the financial return to the landowner is the only thing that counts. It works in private sector, but not for public sector - and unless it is part of a wider regeneration initiative, wider wellbeing benefits are not taken into consideration.  You can see this in relation to a lot public spending as it is cheaper to build on a green belt site than derelict space because the focus is on financial implications.
From housing to hospitals, it is why we have such a legacy of abandoned derelict land because of the way public spending decisions have been made.
The focus would be instead of looking at who benefits from bringing a vacant derelict land back into use and not just purely financial reasons.
Published guidance about how this can be done, encouraging others to use it.

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