Mr. Martin Blackwell:

I am delighted to be here. As Mr. Fitzsimons said, we have been doing this for over 20 years. About 25 years ago, four people came together who had the job title of town centre manager. They met in a pub and decided they ought to talk to each other more often. That became this association that now represents 600 places around the UK and a handful in Ireland. Over those years, we have learned an awful lot about what does and does not work. The key things about any change one wants to make is that it must be done in a genuine partnership. That is a word that is often over-used and misunderstood. It has been really instrumental for us in doing some work over the past couple of years. Town teams was a phrase invented by a lady called Mary Portas who was invited by David Cameron to undertake a review of town centres. Mary Portas did that and we helped and supported her. In the past couple of years, the government has formed something called the Future High Streets Forum. I sit on that forum, which is chaired by a Minister for town centres. We have been carrying out work over the past couple of years with these new groups that have been established called town teams. The government ran a competition and we ran some workshops around England to help places put a good application together. We were all stunned when they got 400 applications from places that wanted to be pilots for some of the ideas in the Portas Review. Over the past two years, we have been commissioned by the government to work with these new town teams and establish them as new groups.

What has been really interesting is that the relationship between town centre management as we know it and town teams is pretty much the same. The same process applies. Town centre management is a process. It is about getting the right people around the table to work together - the key stakeholders. That must be the public sector - local government - the business community and the people. It is a matter of getting those people to come together and work together to establish a vision for what they want their place to be, a vision that will be different in different places. Dublin is very different to many other places. We have just awarded a purple flag, which is our evening and night time economy programme, to Killarney. Places like Bray and Ennis also have that status but they are very different. The evening economy in Killarney is really important to it, much more than in other places. Once one gets that vision to which everybody can sign up, one then develops a strategy to deliver that vision and finally an action plan. The action plan will be different in different places.

We have a number of programmes to support those action plans. One of them is around the evening and night time economy. A total of 50 places around the UK and Ireland now have purple flag status. When the Portas Review came out, I was asked to go and see the Minister at the time. He asked what I thought about the review and I said that we liked some bits, as one does, but were not quite so sure about others. I asked him whether he realised that the motor industry in the UK was worth £10 billion. He gave me a strange look and I said that the fashion industry was worth £20 billion and the telecommunications industry was worth £30 billion. If one adds it all up, it does not come to the value of the evening and night time economy, which is worth £60 billion, but Mary Portas did not mention it. While retail is really important, it is not the whole story. One needs to be able to trade 24-7. Earlier today, I was talking to Richard Guiney who is the manager of Dublin City BID. He thinks that up to 30% of the turnover in Dublin now takes place after dark. One ignores that at one's peril.

The Digital High Street is another one of our other programmes. Earlier witnesses spoke about the importance of online business. We are now delivering a programme to train SMEs and small retailers on how to take advantage of the digital economy. Research in the UK suggests that less than 2% of small retailers are using social media to connect with their customers. We have three basic programmes - three training days - on how to think about getting one's business online. The first one helps people ask the right questions. We hear stories of people spending £20,000 or £30,000 building a fantastic all-singing, all-dancing website that does not do any business because they did not need it. It is about making the right decisions about what is good for one's business in terms of digital.

Another one of our programmes is about opening pop-up stores where young entrepreneurs who possibly have an online business and are doing well want to open premises. We are beginning to see things coming back the other way. Two or three years ago, the rhetoric was "the Internet's going to kill the high street." The rhetoric I now hear is "the smartphone's going to save the high street." I do not believe either is true but finding ways to work with all of that community and to bring everybody together to collectively decide how they want to take their place forward must be the way forward for us. We have got the experience and tools to enable people to do that for themselves. We certainly do not do it for them. We just help and support people and give them the tools and the opportunity to do it for themselves.