Andy Burnham: can the Prime Minister really save the nation's high streets?

Learned readers of this newspaper will be familiar with its commitment to business endeavour at a local and regional level. The Yorkshire Post is proud to advocate on behalf of small and medium enterprise, providing a shop window in which purveyors of goods and services can showcase their wares.

Encouraging people to spend their hard-earned money in the village store, on the high street in town and in the independents in our great cities is something we proudly do, day in, day out.

Cash, too, is encouraged. A twenty-pound-note will spend a million times over and still be worth £20; it isn’t long before a digital ‘twenty pound note’, owing to fees and charges, is worth nothing at all to the local community, swallowed up by banks and payment processing firms.

And, yet, in so many places it has become very difficult indeed to encourage people to go out and spend time shopping on the high street. There are, of course, notable exceptions where the choice is bountiful and the people are lovely, but in too many communities across the country, the pattern is depressingly familiar.

Bookies, vape shop, sunbed shop, charity shop, launderette, exotic barber, fast food outlet and so ad infinitum. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers forced out by kebabs, e-cigarattes and ultra processed food outlets.

This newspaper therefore welcomes Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s vow to give local people, those who care about civic duty, community cohesion and social interaction, their high streets back, shutting down and booting out criminal enterprises hiding behind seemingly legitimate shop fronts. This must come hand in hand with a commitment to ensure planning notices are made more visible, not less so, in local news outlets, online portals and local newsletters. The question is: will he deliver?