I Walked Down My Local High Street Last Week. Half The Shutters Were Down. This Is Britain Now.

16% of British high street shops are now empty. 122,682 have permanently closed in the last decade. Andy Burnham's government is targeting business rates, vape shop regulation, and Community Right to Buy to reverse the decline. Here's what's actually happening to our high streets and whether any of it will work.

There's a Greggs.. There's always a Greggs.. Then a vape shop... Then an empty unit with a faded "To Let" sign that's been there so long the sun has bleached the estate agent's logo. Then another vape shop.. Then a charity shop... Then another empty unit.... Then a bookmaker's..... Then another empty unit......

That's my high street. That's a lot of people's high street. And I'm tired of pretending it's fine.

122,682 shops have permanently closed across Britain in the last decade. That number comes from Parcelhero's latest research and it's so large it stops meaning anything. So let me make it smaller. That's the butcher my nan used. The Woolworths I spent my pocket money in. The bank that's now a Tesco Express. The pub that's now flats. The bookshop that's now nothing. Just a metal shutter and a padlock and a "To Let" sign that nobody's answering.

16% of all shops on British high streets are now empty. In the North East, it's 23%. Nearly one in four units sitting there, doing nothing, while the communities around them wonder why nobody comes into town anymore.

I'm 28. I've watched this happen in real time. And the speed of it still shocks me. We've already blown past the closure rates that were projected for 2030. The numbers that were supposed to be a worst-case scenario four years from now are today's reality.

And here we all are, getting excited about the Perseid meteor showers, the solar eclipse, Binface vs Farage in Clacton, while the high street three minutes from your front door loses another shop every month and nobody notices until there's nothing left to walk to.

How Many Shops Have Closed on UK High Streets? The Numbers Are Brutal.

13,479 stores closed permanently in 2024 alone. That's 37 shops per day. Every single day. For a full year.

83% of department stores that existed in 2016 have disappeared. Debenhams, gone. BHS, gone. House of Fraser, barely clinging on. These weren't small operations. These were anchor tenants that entire shopping centres were built around. When they left, the foot traffic left with them.

PwC reported 12,804 chain store closures in 2024 against only 9,125 openings. Net loss: 3,679 shops. The categories being hit hardest? Pharmacies, pubs and bars, banks, and automotive shops. These aren't luxury businesses. These are essential services. When your local pharmacy closes and the nearest one is a 20-minute drive, that's not a commercial problem. That's a healthcare problem.

And business rates are making it worse. The cut in relief from 75% to 40% means the average shop's rates bill jumped from £3,589 to £8,613 for 2025/26. That's a 140% increase in one year.

For a small independent retailer already running on margins thinner than a Pret napkin, that's the difference between staying open and putting the shutters down for good. Add on employers' liability insurance, public liability, payroll, and the cost of actually hiring an employee and it's a miracle any independent shop survives at all.

It's Not Just About Shopping. It's About Community.

Here's what politicians and economists miss when they talk about "retail trends" and "the shift to online." A high street isn't a collection of shops. It's the spine of a community. We wrote about why small businesses matter before, but this goes beyond economics. This is about what happens to a place when the life drains out of it.

• When the pub closes, the quiz night goes with it.

• When the bank closes, the elderly couple who don't do online banking lose their independence.

• When the post office goes, the small business owner who ships products has to drive 40 minutes to the next one.

• When the café closes, the mums who met there every Tuesday morning after school drop-off lose their social lifeline.

You can't Amazon Prime a sense of belonging.

You can't get community delivered by drone. And you can't scroll through a local economy on your phone at midnight.

I've spoken to founders in our community who run physical businesses. A coffee shop owner in the North West told me she's paying more in business rates than she pays herself in salary. She's using free accounting software because she can't afford a proper accountant. A barber in the Midlands said three shops on his street closed in six months and now there's not enough foot traffic to sustain the ones that are left. A florist in Essex said her landlord increased rent by 30% because "the area is being redeveloped" even though the redevelopment is two empty units and a planning application that's been stalled for three years.

These aren't retail statistics. These are people's lives. Their livelihoods. Their communities. And they're watching them disappear in slow motion while the government talks about "levelling up" from a building in Westminster that's a five-minute walk from sixteen Pret A Mangers.

I wrote about the state of British politics recently and the high street decline is part of the same broken picture. A political class more interested in culture wars than keeping the lights on in town centres.

Andy Burnham's High Street Plan: What He's Actually Doing in 2026

Give him this much: Burnham is the first Prime Minister in years who's actually said the words "high streets are a marker of decline" and then followed it with policy rather than a photo opportunity.

Here's what he's announced so far:

Business rate cuts for pubs, social clubs, and live music venues. Nearly 32,000 venues across England will benefit, saving the typical pub an estimated £1,100 from April next year. That's not transformative. But it's the first time a government has explicitly said "we want these businesses on our high streets" and backed it with money rather than sentiment.

Reviewing reliefs for "anti-social businesses." Specifically targeting vape shops, which have proliferated across struggling high streets partly because they benefit from the same business rate reliefs as other retailers. Burnham's framing is direct: "This government will back the businesses that people want to see in their communities." That's a value judgement. It's also one most people would agree with. Most communities don't want their sixth vape shop. They want a GP surgery.

Giving councils power to regulate what opens. The current "aim to permit" framework means local authorities have limited say over what businesses open on their high street. Burnham is reversing that for betting shops and adult gaming centres, giving councils the ability to reject applications based on local need. The Social Market Foundation has been calling for this for years.

Cracking down on online marketplace tax avoidance. Businesses selling through Amazon and eBay but not complying with UK tax obligations are undercutting high street retailers who pay business rates, employer NI, and corporation tax. Burnham's plan to enforce tax compliance on online sellers levels the playing field slightly.

Community Right to Buy. Giving local people the power to seize boarded-up shops and derelict pubs and turn them into community-owned spaces. This policy existed in some form before but Burnham is expanding the powers and the funding behind them. For founders looking at physical spaces, this combined with government startup loans could make premises affordable for the first time in years.

Is It Enough?

Honestly? Probably not. But it's a start. And "a start" is more than we've had from any PM in the last decade.

The fundamental problem is structural. Online retail has permanently changed how people shop. Amazon isn't going away. Delivery isn't getting slower. The convenience gap between clicking a button and walking to a shop that might not have what you want is real and it's widening.

But that doesn't mean high streets have to die. It means they have to change what they're for. The high streets that are thriving, and some are, aren't competing with Amazon on products. They're offering experiences. Coffee shops where people actually sit down. Barbers and salons that can't be replicated online. Independent restaurants. Markets. Community spaces. Fitness studios. Co-working spaces. Services rather than stuff. And the ones that survive will be the ones who price for experience rather than competing on cost with an algorithm.

Centre for Cities research shows that high streets with larger residential catchments, more people living nearby and walking through, have significantly fewer empty shops. London, Brighton, and York have vacancy rates under 10%. Newport and Bradford are closer to 20%. The difference isn't luck. It's density, investment, and whether the council has actively worked to make the town centre somewhere people want to be.

Burnham seems to understand this. His rhetoric about high streets being "the beating heart of communities" is exactly right.

The question is whether the policy matches the poetry....

What This Means for Founders and Small Businesses

If you run a physical small business, the business rate relief for pubs and venues matters. Check whether you qualify. If you're a startup thinking about a physical location, the Community Right to Buy powers could mean access to affordable commercial space that was previously locked behind landlords waiting for the "right tenant."

If you're building a product that serves local businesses, CRM, inventory management, marketing tools, the high street revitalisation agenda creates demand for exactly what you're selling. More shops staying open means more shops needing software.

And if you're a founder who believes, like I do, that communities matter and that local economies deserve better than a row of empty shops and a Greggs, then pay attention to what Burnham does next. Because this is the first time in a decade that a PM has looked at a high street and said "this isn't good enough" and actually meant it.

Whether the policies work is a different question. But at least someone's asking it.

The High Street I Want to Walk Down

• I want a high street where I can buy a coffee from someone who knows my name.

• Where the butcher argues with the fishmonger about whose queue is longer.

• Where there's a bookshop with a cat asleep in the window and a pub that does a quiz on Tuesdays and a market on Saturdays where someone sells honey they made themselves.

That sounds like nostalgia. Maybe it is. But it's also what Brighton has. What York has. What parts of Manchester have. It's not impossible. It just requires investment, imagination, and a government that treats local economies as something worth protecting rather than inevitable casualties of progress.

I'm Hopeful. Cautiously. But Hopeful.

I've watched enough prime ministers promise to "level up" and then do absolutely nothing to be wary of optimism. Cameron talked about the Big Society while local services got cut. May talked about burning injustices while high streets burned out. Johnson talked about everything and delivered almost nothing. Starmer got in and somehow made things feel even more disconnected. His government failed these communities. The ones before him failed them too. Nobody has looked at a dying high street and actually fixed it.

But something about Burnham feels different. Maybe it's because he was a mayor before he was PM. Mayors see high streets. They walk past the empty units. They hear from the barber who's lost three neighbours in six months. Westminster doesn't see high streets. Westminster sees spreadsheets and GDP figures and "retail sector performance." That's not the same thing.

I'm hopeful he could be the one who actually does something. Not because he's said the right words. Every PM says the right words. But because the policies he's announced, business rate cuts for pubs, council powers over what opens, Community Right to Buy, feel like they were written by someone who's stood in front of a boarded-up shop and thought "this is wrong" rather than someone who's read a briefing paper about vacancy rates.

And there's something else driving this.

E-commerce is failing people in ways nobody predicted.

The convenience was supposed to be enough. It isn't. People are lonely. Communities are fragmenting. You can order anything to your door in 24 hours and still feel like you don't belong anywhere. The high street was never just about buying things. It was about bumping into your neighbour. Having a reason to leave the house. Being part of something physical and local and real. You can't replace that with an app. People are starting to realise that, and I think there's a genuine appetite for high streets to come back, not as shopping destinations but as the places where communities actually happen.

Burnham might be the one to unlock that. Or he might get distracted by the next crisis and the high streets keep declining. I don't know.

But for the first time in a decade, someone in Number 10 is talking about this like it matters. And I'd rather be cautiously hopeful than permanently resigned.

122,682 shops closed in ten years. Behind every single one of those numbers is a person who took a risk, started a business, hired people, served a community, and eventually put a key in a lock for the last time. They deserve better. Their communities deserve better.

Andy Burnham says he's going to do something about it. I hope he means it! Because the alternative is more shutters, more closing down sale signs, and more high streets that exist as a reminder of what we used to care about.

Questions!

Why are UK high streets failing?

A combination of online retail growth, business rate increases (140% jump in 2025/26 for many shops), loss of anchor tenants like department stores (83% gone since 2016), rising rents, reduced foot traffic, and 6,600 bank branch closures removing reasons for people to visit town centres. The pandemic accelerated trends that were already in motion but the structural problems are decades in the making.

How many shops have closed on UK high streets?

122,682 shops permanently closed across Britain in the last decade according to Parcelhero. In 2024 alone, 13,479 stores closed - that's 37 per day. The Centre for Retail Research predicted 17,350 closures in 2025. 16% of all high street units are now empty nationally, rising to 23% in the North East.

What is Andy Burnham doing about high streets?

Burnham announced business rate cuts for 32,000 pubs, clubs and live music venues (saving the typical pub £1,100/year). He's reviewing business rate relief for vape shops, giving councils power to reject betting shop and gaming centre applications, cracking down on online marketplace tax avoidance, and expanding Community Right to Buy powers so local people can purchase boarded-up shops for community use.

What is Community Right to Buy?

A government power that allows local communities to purchase derelict or boarded-up commercial properties and convert them into community-owned spaces. Burnham is expanding both the legal powers and the funding behind it. The aim is to give communities direct control over empty high street units rather than leaving them to landlords waiting for chain tenants.

Are business rates killing high street shops?

They're a significant factor. The reduction in small business rates relief from 75% to 40% in April 2025 meant the average shop's annual rates bill jumped from £3,589 to £8,613. For independent retailers with thin margins, that increase alone can be the difference between survival and closure. Burnham's new rate cuts for pubs and venues are a partial response but don't address the broader burden on retail.

What can founders do to help revive high streets?

Build tools that help local businesses compete: CRM, marketing automation, project management. Consider physical locations where Community Right to Buy creates affordable commercial space. Join startup communities working on local economic development. Every independent retailer that survives is a potential customer for startup software.

Written by @James Beresford-Morgan. Founder. Community builder. Person who'd quite like to buy a loaf of bread from a bakery that isn't inside a supermarket.

If you're a small business owner navigating this, or a founder building tools for local retailers, join our community. The conversations about surviving in 2026 are happening there, not in Westminster. Come to our events and talk to founders who are living this every day.