Cockermouth and District Civic Trust
Our Manifesto for Living Town Centres
Cockermouth and District Civic Trust · October 2026
Homes are the glue that holds a town centre together.
High streets will not be saved by taxing shoppers; they will be saved by making town centres places where people want to live and spend their time.
Purpose
What we seek
Homes at the heart of every town centre: mixed use by default, living over the shop, and higher-density housing in central areas.
The pedestrian first, the car second: reliable and fully accessible public transport, safe walking and cycling, and parking integrated discreetly into the townscape, so that town centres are accessible to everyone without being dominated by the car.
Greener, more welcoming streets: trees, pocket parks, SuDS and rain gardens, and new architecture that builds on local character rather than imitating it.
Planning permission for turning homes into holiday lets, so that towns can plan for the visitor accommodation they need while keeping houses as homes that are lived in, rather than pushing residents out to car-dependent estates at the edge of town.
An end to out-of-centre retail that leaves empty anchor stores in town centres, through a strictly enforced town-centre-first policy.
Abolish business rates for small and independent shops, replacing them with a levy based on the local services each business uses.
An overnight visitor levy for tourist areas, including those outside mayoral authorities, spent where it is raised.
No new tax on shoppers. Enforce the VAT already owed by online marketplace sellers instead.
A formal role for communities and civic societies in shaping and owning their town centres.
The case in full
Each requirement is set out in detail below, with the evidence and reasoning behind it and the changes needed to deliver it.
Homes are the glue of a living town centre
5.30pm
When a town centre with no homes dies
Why residents matter
A town that is alive. A centre that is both home and marketplace is by its nature more social, vibrant and welcoming. People meet by chance, stop to talk, linger and look out for one another. The town feels alive, not merely open for business.
Footfall every hour. Residents buy their bread, coffee and newspaper locally, use the pub and the café in the evening, and support services that a nine-to-five shopping centre cannot sustain.
Historic buildings are lost from the top down
Safety and care. Lit windows and people coming and going provide natural surveillance. Occupied buildings are maintained; empty upper floors decay, and historic buildings are lost from the top down.
Community and identity. People who live in a centre care about it, join its societies and defend it. A town centre with residents has a voice.
Less reliance on the car. Living within walking distance of shops, work, schools and transport cuts traffic, emissions and household costs.
Independence for older and disabled people. Living in the centre puts shops, health services and transport within a short distance, allowing people to stay independent for longer.
Learning from the continent
3–5
storeys of well-made streets, not tower blocks
What we seek
Make mixed use the default. Local plans should require town centre sites to deliver homes alongside commercial floorspace, rather than single-use retail or car parks.
Revive living over the shop. Grants, rate relief and practical, conservation-led guidance to bring empty upper floors back into residential use, including in listed buildings, with separate access secured where needed.
A range of homes. Apartments for young people and downsizers, family homes, affordable and social rent, older people’s housing, and visitor accommodation that brings spending into the centre year-round.
Every home built in the centre is one not built on open countryside
End the fear of density. Higher-density housing in central areas creates the people, buzz and spending that sustain shops and services. It is also the best answer to urban sprawl and the loss of green fields and green belt: every home built in the centre is one not built on open countryside.
Design quality, not just numbers. Good daylight, private or shared outdoor space, cycle and bin storage, and sound insulation between commercial and residential uses, so that town centre living is an attractive choice, not a compromise.
Vision-25 identifies town centre sites ready for this approach. Should Mitchells leave Lorton Street, the Mitchells premises, the old fire station and the Grand Theatre building together offer a cohesive town centre housing scheme. The Lowther Went site offers the chance to replace an unsympathetic shopping precinct with a mix of homes and businesses. Vision-25 also records that Cockermouth has become a dormitory town with few local jobs: the very pattern this manifesto seeks to reverse.
Reduce the dominance of the car
The pedestrian must always come first
£2
Bus fare cap, extended only to the end of 2027. It should be made permanent.
Public transport people can rely on. Frequent, affordable and accessible buses linking towns with their surrounding villages, including evening and Sunday services. The £2 bus fare cap, currently extended only to the end of 2027, should be made permanent and matched by investment in how often buses run. For rural towns, a cheap fare is of little use without a bus to catch.
Walking and cycling first. Safe, direct routes into the centre, good crossings and secure cycle parking.
Hide the car park, not the town. Well-designed, landscaped and screened parking at the edge of the core, replacing surface car parks that front the main streets.
Streets as places. Shared surfaces, wider pavements and lower speeds, so that streets are for people first and traffic second.
Accessible to everyone, with the pedestrian first. A people-first town centre must work for everyone, including those who cannot walk far, cycle or use the bus. That is best achieved by bringing homes, shops and services close together, through fully accessible public transport, and with step-free routes, level surfaces and frequent places to sit and rest. Where vehicle access is needed for people with limited mobility, it must be discreet and designed into the street scene, never a reason for the car to dominate it.
Vision-25 proposes consolidating parking at Fairfield, freeing less well-connected car parks for more appropriate development. It also proposes linking the town’s disconnected footpaths into a network of riverside and circular walks, including a new footbridge between the brewery confluence and the Memorial Gardens. Together these put the car at the edge of the town and the pedestrian at its heart.
Attractive, green, people-friendly high streets
Compete on quality of place
Trees and pocket parks. Street trees along main streets, and small green spaces on gap sites and underused corners.
Flood risk is a pressing issue for Cumbrian towns
SuDS and rain gardens. Sustainable drainage that manages flood risk, a pressing issue for Cumbrian towns, while greening the street.
Places to pause. Seating, shelter, play, public toilets and good lighting.
Respect historic character, without pastiche. Shopfront design guidance, a heritage-led approach in conservation areas, and grants for repairing historic frontages and upper floors. But conservation should not mean doggedly copying the past. New buildings should offer fresh interpretations of the local vernacular, so that the townscape continues to reflect advances in architecture and building technique, as it always has.
Vision-25 calls for the phased replacement of the town’s ageing street trees, beginning with Station Street, and the greening of underused spaces such as the courtyard off Station Street. It calls for firm enforcement of the shopfront design guide. It also calls for a town that turns to face its rivers rather than away from them. The former Jennings Brewery site shows what this could look like, with a riverside development that includes a smart energy demonstration facility powered by the River Cocker.
Keep houses as homes
Every home turned into a holiday let is a home lost to the town
“The problem is not that holiday lets exist; it is that, at present, nobody can control how many there are or where they go.”
The chain of harm
Homes lost from the centre. In popular towns, whole streets of terraced houses and flats over shops have become holiday lets. They are empty for much of the year and occupied by visitors for the rest. The residents who sustained the shops, schools, pubs and clubs are gone.
Residents priced out. Fewer homes and higher prices force local households, especially young people and key workers, out of the town they grew up or work in.
Pressure for estates at the edge. The housing they need is then built as new estates on green fields at the edge of town. Every lost home in the centre is replaced by one further out.
More car dependence. Those estates are a drive away from shops, services, schools and work. Traffic, parking demand and emissions rise, and the town centre loses the footfall that living close by would have brought.
A town that empties. The result is a town centre that is busy in August and dark in February, and a wider town that sprawls into the countryside while its heart hollows out. That runs against everything this manifesto argues for.
Where the law stands
Timeline
2023
Consultation. Confirmed Feb 2024. Not yet introduced.
What we seek
Plan for visitor accommodation, don’t leave it to chance. Local plans should set out how much short-term accommodation each town needs and where it should go: purpose-built, over shops, in converted buildings unsuited to permanent homes, or on allocated sites. Applications that meet that plan should be supported; those that would erode the local housing stock should not.
Make the change of use subject to planning. Introduce the short-term let use class without further delay. Converting a home into a holiday let should require planning permission, with no blanket permitted development right to switch between the two.
Local control where pressure is greatest. Councils and national park authorities should be able to refuse further conversions in towns and villages where holiday lets already make up a high share of homes.
A register that works. Bring in the national register of short-term lets and link it to planning and council tax records, so councils know where every let is and can enforce the rules.
Principal residence conditions on new homes. In high-pressure areas, new homes, especially those built in town centres, should be restricted to people’s main residence, as St Ives and the Lake District have done.
Use the tax powers. Councils should apply the full second homes council tax premium, with the income spent on homes for people who live and work in the area.
End the short-termism of out-of-town retail
One of the most damaging planning choices of the last forty years
The pattern
The anchor leaves, the town follows. A major store draws people who then visit the bank, the butcher, the café and the chemist. When it goes, those linked trips go with it, and neighbouring businesses lose trade.
The voids are unfillable. Large anchor units are too big and too specialised for local businesses and too far down the national retailers’ priorities. They stand empty for years, blighting the street around them.
The costs fall on the public. Councils are left trying to fill the gap with regeneration money, while those without a car face multiple bus journeys to reach the new store. In Weymouth, older and less mobile residents have complained of exactly this after M&S moved to a retail park.
It is happening everywhere. M&S’s estate strategy favours larger stores with free parking on retail parks; Blackburn is losing its town centre store for a food-only site about two and a half miles away.
M&S has announced it will leave Workington town centre for a site near B&Q. This will leave a gap in the centre that is very unlikely to be filled and puts the town centre’s survival at serious risk. A planning system that claims to support sustainable high streets and towns should not permit it.
The opposite is possible
What we seek
Enforce town centre first. Apply the sequential test and retail impact test rigorously, and refuse out-of-centre proposals that would leave an anchor unit empty or harm the vitality of a centre.
Lower the impact threshold for small towns. Require impact assessments at a much smaller floorspace in towns such as Workington, Cockermouth, Maryport and Keswick, where one store can make or break the centre.
Make relocation a material consideration. Where a proposal involves a retailer leaving a town centre, the effect of the vacated unit should weigh heavily against approval, with any permission tied to binding obligations to secure its reuse.
Close the Class E loophole. Out-of-centre retail park permissions should carry conditions restricting goods and floorspace, and councils should use Article 4 directions to stop unrestricted changes of use.
Plan for the centre. Local plans should allocate town centre sites for mixed-use and residential development, and councils should use compulsory purchase and community ownership to bring empty anchors back into use.
Replace business rates for small shops with a service-based levy
Abolish rates for small shops. Raising the threshold below which businesses pay nothing is welcome, but a tax on notional rental value still penalises occupying town centre property and rewards empty units and out-of-centre sheds.
A quiet bookshop pays little; a late-night venue pays its fair share
Charge for the services used. Replace rates with a transparent local levy tied to what a business draws on: refuse and recycling collection, street cleansing, and policing, including public disorder associated with the night-time economy. A quiet bookshop pays little; a late-night venue that generates extra cleansing and policing pays its fair share.
Protect town centre anchors. The higher rate introduced in April 2026, aimed at large online warehouses, also caught department stores and hotels, the very buildings that anchor town centres. Any reform must support anchors, not penalise them.
2 years
Length of the rates freeze, from April 2027
A lasting fix, not piecemeal relief. The government has raised the Small Business Rate Relief threshold, continued the 20% cut for pubs, clubs and music venues, and frozen rates for other retail, hospitality and leisure properties, but the freeze lasts only two years from April 2027. Temporary relief is welcome, but it is not reform. Small shops cannot plan or invest on a two-year horizon, and the promise to replace business rates remains unmet. Small shops need a permanent settlement, not a rolling series of temporary freezes and sector exemptions.
Relief that favours the town centre. The current freeze applies equally to retail parks and out-of-town stores, so it does nothing to tilt the balance back towards the high street. A permanent settlement should be designed to favour town centre premises.
A visitor levy for tourist towns
This includes Cockermouth
Wherever visitors stay. The levy should apply in any town where visitors stay overnight, inside or outside a national park. The Trust accepts that this includes Cockermouth: the town welcomes visitors to Wordsworth House, its historic centre and the Lakes beyond, and they should contribute to its upkeep too.
Visitors should share the cost. They place heavy pressure on parking, refuse, public toilets, footpaths and emergency services, yet contribute little to their upkeep. Residents and small traders carry that cost today.
Include all overnight lets. Hotels, guest houses, holiday lets, Airbnb and other short-term platform lets, and commercially let second homes should all be covered.
Devolution must reach rural areas. As fiscal powers are devolved to local leaders, Cumbria must not be excluded because it sits outside the city-based mayoralties.
Spend it where it is raised
Spend it where it is raised. Revenue should be ringfenced for the public realm, transport and services in the town that generates it.
An online sales tax is the wrong answer
We agree with the problem; we disagree with the remedy
A sales tax is paid by the customer. A higher tax on online purchases raises prices during a cost of living crisis. It falls hardest on those who depend on deliveries: older and disabled people, carers, and rural households far from a shop.
It protects the big players, not the small. Large supermarkets and multiples have long backed an online sales tax. It shelters their large stores; it does little for the independent trader on a small-town high street.
£90,000
Annual sales above which marketplaces collect VAT for UK sellers, from October 2027
Enforcement is not a new tax. Requiring online marketplaces to collect VAT already owed by their sellers is fair enforcement of existing tax. The government has confirmed this approach: from October 2027, marketplaces will collect VAT on behalf of UK businesses selling more than £90,000 a year through them, with the revenue going to business rates relief. The Trust welcomes the government’s decision to choose enforcement over a new tax on shoppers.
It treats the symptom and misreads the high street. People drift away from town centres because they are hard to reach without a car, unattractive to spend time in, and empty outside shop hours; making online shopping dearer fixes none of that. Nor is a high street simply a shop to be protected from a rival. Online retail is a transaction; a living high street is a place that also sells goods. Nobody browses an online store for pleasure or finds meaning and purpose there, but people do on a good high street. That is the high street’s strength, and it is what policy should build on.
“Online retail is a transaction; a living high street is a place that also sells goods.”
Put communities in charge
6 in 10
want more local power over their high street. Only 15% trust government to decide better.
A formal role for civic societies. Civic trusts, town councils and traders’ groups should help shape town centre strategies, masterplans and the spending of Pride in Place and community ownership funding.
Community ownership of empty anchors. Extend community right-to-buy and ownership funds so that a unit vacated by a major retailer can be brought back into use by and for the town.
Restore community cohesion. A lack of community cohesion and tolerance is more evident where town centres are failing. A neglected high street erodes people’s sense that their town is cared for, and with it their sense of belonging to a shared community. Restoring the centre helps restore both.
In summary: what we seek
Town centres thrive when people live in them as well as work, meet and shop there. To make every town centre a living one, we seek:
Glossary
A large shop that draws people into a town centre; its customers then use smaller shops and services nearby.
A direction made by a local planning authority that removes specified permitted development rights in a defined area, so that planning permission is needed for those changes.
A property tax paid by the occupiers of most non-domestic premises, based on the property’s rateable value (an estimate of its annual rent).
The “Commercial, Business and Service” use class, introduced in England in 2020. It groups shops, cafés, restaurants, offices, gyms, clinics, nurseries and similar uses together, so a building can change between them without planning permission.
The legal power of a council or other public body to acquire land or buildings without the owner’s agreement, with compensation, where it is in the public interest.
Bringing empty upper floors above shops and other ground-floor businesses back into use as homes.
Development that combines different uses, such as homes, shops, workplaces and leisure, in the same building, street or area.
A national grant of planning permission that allows certain building works and changes of use without a planning application.
A small public green space, often created on a vacant plot or underused corner.
A planning condition restricting a new home to use as its occupier’s only or main home, so it cannot become a second home or holiday let.
A shallow planted bed that collects rainwater from roofs, roads and pavements and lets it soak slowly into the ground, reducing run-off and flood risk.
An assessment of the likely effect of an out-of-centre retail or leisure proposal on existing town centres, required above a set floorspace threshold.
A planning test requiring town centre uses such as shops to be located in town centres first, then at the edge of centres, and out of centre only if no suitable site is available.
A proposed new planning use class in England for homes let as short-term holiday accommodation. The government has said it will create it but has not yet done so.
A reduction in business rates, up to full exemption, for businesses occupying properties below a set rateable value.
Ways of managing rainwater close to where it falls, mimicking natural drainage: for example rain gardens, swales, permeable paving, green roofs and ponds. They reduce flooding and pollution.
A small charge per night added to the cost of overnight accommodation, paid by visitors and spent locally.
Sources
Tax online sales more heavily to save high streets, Burnham urged, The Guardian, 22 October 2026
M&S confirms Blackburn relocation, Place North West
M&S to close 93-year-old Weymouth store ahead of move, Sunday Guardian Live
Bensons relocates to new Workington store, Furniture News, October 2021
Cockermouth Vision-25, Cockermouth and District Civic Trust, January 2025
Budget 2026, HM Treasury, October 2026