It is time to design the framework and an “operator of record” sector which owns what happens after the builders leave.

Sefton Council refurbished Southport’s market hall in 2012 and set itself a plain test of 90 per cent of the stalls let out. Occupancy hovered around 70 units for a while, then slid, and kept sliding, until roughly only one stall in five was trading. A forecast profit of £157,000 became a loss of about £130,000, and the support the market needed climbed towards £367,000. The council’s own papers recorded the causes without varnish. Low footfall, traders in arrears, rents the trade could not carry, units at the back that nobody walking past could see. The refurbishment had delivered everything it promised, except a market anyone used.

Then, in 2021, the same council repaired its own failure. The repair is the interesting part of the story. Using £1.4 million from the Town Deal and the Liverpool City Region, Sefton stopped refurbishing the fabric and completely rebuilt the proposition instead. The traditional stalls gave way to ten food units, a central bar under an experienced hospitality operator and an events space. It was an offer aimed at the visitor town Southport actually is, rather than the retail town it once was. The forty-year butcher stayed, now in a new unit at the front. Crucially, the independents came in on rents linked to their turnover, so the market and its traders now succeed or struggle together. The venue met its business-plan targets within eight months, several of its start-ups have since opened second sites, and the surrounding quarter has been drawing new investment ever since.

Here is the detail worth considering. That 90 per cent target existed from 2012. Someone set it, someone measured against it, and for the better part of a decade the measuring changed nothing. What eventually turned the place around was another round of capital and, above all, the honest admission that the “proposition” was wrong, rather than the paintwork. The repair was excellent. The nine years it took to arrive, were the system working exactly as designed.

That is the real gap in British regeneration, and it is not the one most people assume. The common complaint is that government pours money into town centres and never checks what happens. That complaint is now out of date. Go through the assurance frameworks and monitoring schedules behind the Towns Fund, the Future High Streets Fund, the Levelling Up Fund and the Shared Prosperity Fund and you find footfall targets, vacancy rates, trader-survival measures and business-diversity indicators written into the returns. Trafford Council built exactly that kind of measurement into its Stretford scheme, down to using the shopping centre’s own door counters. The data and the machinery to collect the data exist.

What does not exist is any consequence attached to the answer the data generates.

Nor was Southport’s first attempt an outlier. Hackney Walk (which I analysed in my Insight, When the Money Looks Better Than the Market), ran the same paradigm at greater public cost. Twelve railway arches converted for a fashion district that never came, all twelve arches recorded empty by 2023, the occupancy known to the decimal and acted on by no one.

The construction industry understands the aftermath of construction better than the funding system understands the aftermath of a development, and it has a name for the day a building is finished. Practical completion. A certificate is signed, retention money is held back against what might yet go wrong, and for the following 12 months the contractor remains answerable for cracked render and failed seals under a defects liability period the industry enforces without much sentiment, as anyone who has chased retention will confirm. Notice the asymmetry this creates, because once seen it is hard to ignore. The “fabric” of a regenerated street carries a warranty, enforced to the day. The “life” of the street, the trading, the footfall, the daily usefulness of the place, opens to the public entirely uninsured. There is a certificate for the moment the building is finished. No one has yet thought to draft one for the moment the place starts working.

The funding system treats the box as the product

Look at where the real penalties sit, because the funding agreements are not toothless documents and it would be lazy to pretend otherwise. Money has been suspended and clawed back where a delivery partner failed to deliver or mismanaged what it was given, and capital left uncommitted, or spent on ineligible items, has had to go back to the Treasury, as the arrangements behind schemes in Wolverhampton and Grantham illustrate. The national assurance framework behind the Levelling Up Fund goes further still, pausing payments mid-programme, demanding a recovery plan, and releasing the money only once the remedial work is evidenced. These are real levers and they are genuinely pulled. But read the triggers slowly and the pattern clearly shows that every one of them concerns the period before the ribbon is cut. Money moving to the wrong places, milestones slipping, procurement gone wrong, a scheme stalling short of completion. Every lever with force behind it asks how the money moved and whether the thing was built, on time and to specification. What none of them asks is whether the finished street, its retail mix and its public realm are alive.

Search the public record for a single case where a council was made to repay a grant because the place it built was dead two years later, and you will not find one. I personally checked. The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have looked at the wider picture and reached the same place from a different direction, reporting that government could not show what billions in levelling-up money had actually achieved. Completion is enforced. Outcome is filed.

So, this is the mechanism stated plainly. We measure whether the patient survives the surgery and we pay the surgeon the moment the operation ends, on the strength of the incision being neat. Someone does check back thereafter, writes down that the patient did not make week two, and puts the note in a drawer.

To be fair to the direction of travel, part of the system already works the right way, and it matters commercially as much as politically. The gateway machinery bites during delivery, and for any investor or development partner in a funded scheme that discipline is welcome, since nothing erodes a scheme’s value like a public counterparty that cannot hold its own programme together. The trouble is that the machinery switches off at exactly the wrong moment. It runs hard up to the day the asset opens and then stops, precisely when the questions that determine value begin. Is anyone trading? Is anyone coming? Anyone who has underwritten a mixed-use scheme knows those years decide whether the yield compounds or decays, and knows they are the years the framework largely ignores.

The question the application form never asks

Start by setting aside the most intuitive correction, because it fails on contact with reality. The symmetrical fix – clawing the grant back when the outcome disappoints – is used by no regeneration system worth studying, and the restraint is well founded. Begin with the plainest fact of municipal life, which is that the money is gone. A council that has spent its grant on paving, steelwork and landscaping holds the value as concrete, and a fair number of English councils are close enough to a section 114 notice that any repayment would come straight out of services. Beyond that, footfall is shaped by forces well beyond any single scheme. A street can empty because a recession arrived, because an anchor tenant closed down, because a landlord three doors down sold to a destructive or negligent landlord, and so on. Recovering public money from a council for weather it did not make, returns nothing to the street, and it teaches every other authority one lesson, which is to back the safe scheme in the place that was going to be more or less fine in the first instance. Retrospective clawback would punish ambition precisely where policy most needs it.

The consequence has to hardwired earlier in the sequence than the cheque, and closer to the operating layer than the hosting council. Demand can be tested before capital is committed, and the testing is neither exotic nor dear. Try to put out a trading unit to open tender with no reserve rent and the market likely prices its own demand by surfacing interest as a low bid before construction rather than an empty unit after it. Step the rent upward over time and the same test runs in slow motion, a business proving it can carry increasing exposure before it is handed a permanent home. A place I examined for the purpose of this Insight and found rather interesting is Singapore’s national hawker-centre estate managed by the National Environment Agency. The system runs the first mechanism at national scale and holds occupancy near 97 per cent. Glasgow’s meanwhile-use programme runs the second, a peppercorn rent in year one rising to market by year four. And Southport’s repair ran a version of both models at once, matching the offer to the demand that actually existed and putting the independents on turnover rents, which is why its consequence now operates continuously, trader by trader, month by month, rather than arriving once a decade as a business case with an apology in it.

Pop Brixton in South London is usually praised for its temporary lease, and the praise slightly misses the point. The lease mattered, but the structural feature was an operating layer with something at stake. An operator held the place on terms that depended on performance, an independent evaluation measured that performance, and the evaluation (rather than goodwill) earned a lease extension. Most grant-assisted regeneration has no equivalent after opening day. The capital is released, the scheme completes and the operating questions of who curates the mix, who watches the numbers, who acts when they slide, fall to whoever happens to hold the asset. Increasingly that is a private owner rather than a council, and here the outcomes divide along a line every practitioner will recognise. Where the owner is a substantial, organised business intending to hold and compound the asset, the operating layer tends to be taken seriously (although the exceptions are notorious enough to keep anyone honest). Where the owner’s business model ends at completion, or the finished scheme passes to a party whose interest reaches no further than collecting the ground rent, the operating questions become someone else’s, which in practice means no one’s.

Which reframes the policy question of who should hold the post-opening role, the support, the coordination and, where needed, the enforcement, and what mix of aligned interest, local knowledge and operating capability the role demands. This is a more interesting question than which new penalty to draft.  Every stage before opening already has a named party with something at stake. The contractor through the defect warranty period, the funder through conditions precedent, the CDM consultant, the monitoring surveyor through an appointment that in each case ends, quite tellingly, at completion. After opening, the roll call goes quiet, and each obvious candidate carries part of what the role needs while lacking the rest. The local authority has the mandate and rarely the operating capability. A Business Improvement District has the street knowledge and a levy behind it, but only a five-year horizon and no say over capital. Meanwhile, an owner-appointed operator has the sharpest alignment of all and exists only where an owner has chosen to appoint one.

What the funding rules could do tomorrow costs almost nothing. Make the final payment conditional on the applicant naming the party who holds that role for the first five years of trading, with the occupancy and footfall data the scheme already collects reported to them, and a duty to produce a remedial plan when the numbers slide. Officer time, some governance, a page in the agreement. The final payment is still released on current industry terms, but the requirement to appoint a party that takes the “operator of record” role – and a suitable, properly vetted one, that is – should begin to break the habit of treating opening day as the end of everyone’s curiosity. Now, naming that operator of record exposes the deeper deficiency, because in Britain the honest answer to ‘who could do this’ is a very short list. The country has world-class placemakers, leasing strategists, masterplanners and developers in professional abundance, and the leasing orthodoxy they mostly serve – the long institutional lease followed by a move to the next scheme – was built for a world of land tenure that is visibly ending. What the country has never built is a standing framework, still less a sector, for curating the operation of public-facing places coherently after completion.

The closest attempt, the High Streets Task Force, was commissioned in 2019, trained nearly a thousand placemakers, advised 150 local authorities, and was concluded in September 2024, five years of well-regarded diagnosis with no operating mandate attached at any point. Which is, increasingly, the British way with its town centres. We have become world leaders in the excellent consultation, concluded on time and on budget, delivering a well-received consultation report, whose principal recommendation is a further consultation.

Barcelona took the other road three decades ago. Its Municipal Institute of Markets, an autonomous public body founded in 1991 with traders sitting on its board alongside the council, has run the city’s market network ever since, planning renewals, co-investing with stallholders, tendering operators and watching the footfall its sensors collect. One city treated the life of its trading places as a permanent institutional responsibility. The other country (ours) treats it as a five-year programme, an advisory report, and someone else’s job.

That gap, between a professional class built for completion and a national need that begins at completion, is where my argument hinges. The measurement problem is largely solved and the funding machinery, for all the criticism above, is more disciplined than it was a decade ago. The unclaimed ground is the operating decade after the ribbon is cut, and the interesting question for everyone who owns, funds or advises on these places is who assembles the capability to hold it, on what terms, and with whose capital behind them. Southport found its answer nine years and one honest business case late. The schemes opening this year would presumably prefer an address for the question before they need one.