ATCM Chief Executive's Blog - A new Milestone in monitoring performance

A new Milestone in monitoring performance
Thursday 09 July 2009

There is much speculation in the press and on the web about the level of retail vacancy in our town and city centres and about how they are weathering the recession. This once again demonstrates the need for a central source of up to date information on town centre performance. We and others have been talking about this for some time and various steps have been taken, but none has really provided what is needed so far.

As far back as 1993, I was involved in a research project for the then Department of the Environment (today's CLG) on what the future held for town and city centres in the UK. Published as Vital and Viable Town Centres: Meeting the Challenge (HMSO 1994), this report identified a number of indicators for both vitality and viability that were also incorporated into the new Planning Policy Guidance Note 6 on town centres as indicators local planning authorities could use. They are still in the current PPS6 and have also been referenced in Scottish planning statements. A few years later, ATCM produced its own guide to Key Performance Indicators which looked at different aspects of regional health, town centre health, town centre progress and some specific indicators. Although guiding the collection of data, much is still done on an ad hoc basis making meaningful comparisons difficult.

Government produces a range of statistics on aspects of town centre performance, but it is often difficult to find, arising as it does from different government departments and agencies, or else is historic (the latest data on the CLG State of the Cities site is for 2004). This can make monitoring of performance difficult at a time when it has never been more important. Our tips for surviving the recession (see http://www.atcm.org/ceo-blog/info.php?refnum=30) were featured in the Government's Looking after our town centres  (April 2009 - see http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/planningandbuilding/towncentres) and stressed the importance of knowing what is going in the centre in question and how it compares with other similar or neighbouring centres. This is why we were delighted to announce at the Belfast Summer School that we have made significant progress with creating a new central database of information on what we hope will be at least 400 town and city centres in the UK and to be able to demonstrate many of the things it will do.

The new database, called Milestone, is a joint initiative between ATCM and Springboard (who we already work with on the monthly High Street Index). Diane Wehrle, who is a Director of Springboard and is on the Board of ATCM, presented an overview of the new service at the Summer School. This explained the rationale for developing Milestone, noted the work that the ATCM Key Cities Group has done on identifying and developing the various indicators, and explained the approach of working with various commercial and government data providers to develop a comprehensive overview of performance. We are still talking with some data providers to fill gaps and we are certainly interested in any proposals from those with data.

The aspect of Diane's presentation that really excited the audience was the run through of what accessing Milestone would be like. Using Nottingham as an example, Diane initially took delegates through the basic service that will be offered (the Town Profile), showing what data will be available and demonstrating how it will look and how it can be used. The Town Profile covers Economic Profile and Trends, Property Trends, Consumer Demand, Centre Provision and Centre Quality. She then showed how the next level of service, the Benchmarking Report, could be used and the flexibility it gives to users, before doing the same with the third option, the Similarity Report and finally looking at how the Scenario Testing service could be used. You can look through the presentation yourself here http://www.atcm.org/uploads/DOCS/209-Diane_Wehrle_-_Using_Intelligence.pdf

The next few months will see further refinement and development of Milestone and to ensure it truly reflects the needs of those working to promote the vitality and viability of town and city centres we will be running seminars as part of the ATCM regional meeting programme in the Autumn with a launch in 2010. This is still very much a service in development but judging by the very positive response at the Summer School, it is well on the way to making a major contribution to the lack of information and intelligence about our town and city centres. It was Peter Drucker who famously noted that what gets measured gets managed and it would appear we are on the verge of being a giant leap closer to the former which should make the latter a whole lot easier.