Agenda item

To update the Overview & Scrutiny Committee on the impact of the North Walsham High Street Heritage Action Zone initiative and learning from this, to establish a set of evaluation criteria, including baselines, that can then be used for similar projects in other towns in North Norfolk.

Cllr J. Toye gave a brief presentation on the report and took questions from the Committee.

Cllr Hankins asked what key elements had been learned from the project and said that bullet points highlighting those would have been useful in the report. Cllr Toye said the Council now had a baseline and from the data presented in the report could now monitor and use for future projects within North Norfolk town centres. Cllr Toye agreed to take the idea of bullet points onboard for the future.

Cllr Penfold felt a clearer distinction between project impact vs town centre health would have been of benefit and it was important that, if in partner projects such as this, the Council took away learning focused on discovering what the priorities of that partner were to help better understand it’s objectives and what it hoped to achieve and the impact their investment, as a partner, had. The EGM believed that the Council had moved on enormously since the bid for NW HAZ was made in 2019 and said officers had no real evidence at that time but that they did now have that data available for all towns. He added that they key was how that information was used in a meaningful way and that it might be better to distil that into a dashboard type of system rather than bullet points, as suggested. In terms of business cases and attracting funding, the Council did not have this data previously but did now and as a result was in a much stronger position going forward.

The EGM explained that the Council had a project management team and there was a requirement for officers to provide an evaluation framework before starting any project such as this, and the project management team had been set up as a  result of the learning gained from the NW HAZ when the Council recognised it needed to be able to monitor a projects impact better than it previously did.

Cllr Penfold said a report such as this should have perhaps had more focus on heritage, including the town’s stories and people, as this could be an economic driver and help with regeneration. Cllr Toye acknowledged this but said the purpose of the report was to assess how the Council monitored the effects of a particular project, the health and economy of the town, so if there was a heritage project elsewhere this would still help inform the Council of its outcomes. The heritage aspects of NW HAZ were covered in the previous report to the Committee. Cllr Penfold felt that heritage, and assessing the health of a town, also meant asking about a sense of place and wondered if young people understood their heritage which the EGM agreed with and took onboard but said it was harder, and less tangible, to monitor, whether it would be cultural or heritage. The EGM said when those local ‘sense of place’, be it cultural or heritage, events took place there was good evidence to show a strong spike in footfall reinforcing that both were strong economic drivers.

Cllr Bayes queried if people were spending money when in the town and focused on car parking and the amount of time people were staying in the town and commented on the 8 empty retail units.  He asked whether those vacancies were comparable with other similar size towns in the district which had not seen that level of funding. Cllr Toye said when the funding was allocated for a particular project the Council could not then look to spend that on a different town it had to be spent on the town to which it was given. Cllr Toye felt that the report clearly showed that North Walsham was growing and more people were visiting the town and there was data there that could determine what groups, i.e. students, that those visitors fell into. The EGM said he would have liked to have a better understanding of the public transport data to understand the net gain of people coming in compared with those going out. The units that were vacant were constrained by size so limited the type of business that might move in but short of conducting high street business surveys, which were labour intensive, and asking for turnovers, which businesses may be reluctant to share, it was difficult to monitor the impact on business growth. The EGM agreed officers needed more data but said that there was a limit on what they could obtain. Cllr Toye said it was very important for Members to engage with that economic activity and get businesses local to their area to sign up to ‘In the Know’, with Invest North Norfolk.

North Walsham East was the most deprived area in the district so Cllr Shires felt that judging the success of the project based on what money people were spending in the town would be unfair, it was about what time people were willing to invest in their local area and how they felt about the town they lived and worked in.

Cllr Fitch-Tillett felt that, after talking to people, they didn’t use the town any longer as they couldn’t just come into the marketplace and pop into the shops as they used to. In response, Cllr Heinrich stated that there was plenty of free parking in Bank Loke and that was less than a 1-minute walk into town. He pointed out that traffic figures for train stations were no longer available as Government didn’t publish them so that footfall was hard to measure but figures on the Bittern line were in excess of pre-Covid numbers and rising. North Walsham figures were below that rate of increase and he believed that was due to the 30min express bus service into Norwich which had made the city more accessible and made a great difference to the town and its residents.

Cllr Gray felt investment into North Walsham, the largest town in North Norfolk, was long overdue and congratulated the team behind the project and he believed there was a large interest from businesses in filling those remaining empty units. Cllr Toye said the Economic Growth Team always there to help investors looking to come into town and develop an existing unit but in reflection of Cllr Heinrich’s point that some of those buildings were restricted by the fact they were so small was the downside of heritage and having many historic buildings that perhaps could not be developed so easily.

The EGM agreed with the points raised by Cllr Gray who was concerned there were some omissions from the report such as New Road car park as an important avenue into the town. Cllr Gray also felt the Shambles Loke was so beautifully done and there were a lot of people that used that space so having no data to reflect that positive impact he saw as a disservice to that area; equally the Black Swan garden space had not been captured but other than that he believed this was a good report. The EGM manager explained how the system they used as a source for getting much of their footfall data, ActiveXChange worked and agreed to look at how they could pull out more information based on specific areas within a town. Cllr Gray wished to ensure that if this project was used as a template for similar ventures going forward that the Council was best reflecting all the data that was open to them;  he was aware of a footfall counter that had been installed at the former Barclays site that had been collecting data for a few years but nothing on the report to suggest that data had been used. The EGM admitted that counter was no longer active but noted the feedback. Cllr Toye thanked the Committee for some good insights into the project and they would use those going forward.

The EGM reassured Cllr Hankins that the demographics used to describe certain households were what was called a mosaic, cross-channel consumer classification that was adopted to segment the markets and used by Experian, the UKs main credit reference agency, so a known and recognised quantity.  

The Chair agreed that some scope to quantify the economic benefit as well as the social and heritage benefit wasn’t captured quite as it could have been. The EGM confirmed they had no spend data available to them to consider within the report.

It was confirmed by the Chair that the feedback given will be captured as actions by the officers, so no formal recommendation was required.

The Committee provided feedback upon, and noted, the review.