Activating high streets
The challenge
The Mayor and the Ealing High Streets Taskforce are looking for innovators to develop solutions that use data to activate vacant properties on high streets and support London’s recovery from COVID-19.
Town Centres and high streets across the London Borough of Ealing.
Local businesses, boroughs, business improvement districts, traders associations and organisations with an interest in activating vacant units on high streets.
- The London Recovery Programme, chaired jointly by the Mayor of London, takes a missions-based approach to Recovery from the coronavirus crisis. The High Streets for All mission sets out the am bition to deliver exciting new uses for underused high street buildings.
- The London Town Centre Health Check 2017 revealed high vacancy rates in some of Ealing’s Town Centres. These long-term trends will likely be exacerbated by current economic conditions.
- Ealing suffers from widespread deprivation and inequality, with eight out of 23 wards ranked in the top 20 per cent most deprived wards nationally. High levels of pre-existing deprivation and inequality have been further exposed by the pandemic.
- Ealing is an entrepreneurial borough, with over 3,000 creative enterprises and 93% of all businesses classified as micro-sized. There is the opportunity to support these enterprises whilst reactivating vacant units to facilitate the recovery of our high streets.
- There is no aggregated tracker or mapping of vacancies, resulting in limited opportunities to act strategically to secure better results for occupiers, landlords, high streets and neighbourhoods.
The solution
Create a data service that will aggregate multiple data sources related to vacant properties on high streets to enable the utilisation and occupation of empty spaces.
- Users have actionable recommendations based on accurate and up to date data.
- Aggregation and mapping of data from multiple sources including freeholder data held by the Greater London Authority (GLA) and open online listings, as well as new data collected through empty property business rate relief registration.
- Analysis of this data, including actionable recommendations to facilitate the proactive and strategic activation of these units.
- A comprehensive real-time view including ability to compare current data with historic, helping to better identify and respond to trends, and evaluate the impact of interventions.
- Easy to use and visually accessible, ensuring that opportunities and trends can be easily identified.
- Reduced vacancy rates contribute to high street vitality, addressing the wider impacts of vacant units including reduced footfall, reduced local pride, poor social cohesion and discouragement of further investment.
- Increased levels of business incubation and meanwhile-use activity, creating opportunities for micro, small and medium enterprises, including start-ups, entrepreneurs and local enterprises to innovate and experiment.
- Increased diversity of uses on high streets to ensure that Ealing’s high streets adapt and diversify to fill a broader role, maximizing opportunities to secure social and community value, whilst ensuring that town centres are protected.
Winners and finalists
Each team will receive £10,000 and the opportunity to work closely over five weeks with the Resilience Partner behind their challenge – which include councils, government agencies, BIDs and charities – to develop their solution. They’ll also receive specialised support in service design, pitch coaching, data usage, navigating government procurement processes and more.
At the end of the first phase, the judges will review each team’s progress and choose one winner in each challenge, to be awarded £40,000 each and the chance to implement their solution.
Sqwyre.com is a commercial location database supporting research into business properties in England and Wales. It aggregates open data on rental valuations, rates paid and vacancies, and employment into an integrated time-series database of individual industrial, office and retail business premises. They will be working with local government and high-street stakeholders to develop their data service to contribute to reducing vacancy rates and increasing opportunities for our entrepreneurs and communities
There are few with our experience and skills with working with local authority vacancy data. We believe the Activating High Streets Challenge is an opportunity to prove the value of location data research, collaborate with local government and high-street stakeholders, and produce accessible, engaging research which increases opportunities for entrepreneurs and communities.
The Vacancy Visualiser will help councils, businesses and the wider community to find vacant commercial properties that meet their needs.
We are very excited to be working with the forward-thinking team at the London Borough of Ealing who have identified the issue of vacant properties as one that is of the highest importance and worthy of this level of focus.
Nquiringminds’ Economic Analyser applies advanced analytics, statistical techniques and visualisations to the problem of local economic planning of high streets. Economic Analyser securely combines data from a range of sources: historic and current local authority business rates data, including relief and vacancy data, Companies house open data, open online listings and mapping information. It uses a range of analytical and visualisation techniques to create a suite of tools to help understand, manage, and plan the local economy.
We believe that our high streets are of critical importance to the fabric of British society. Our high streets have social as well as economic worth and opportunity for our communities. High streets have suffered particularly during the COVID pandemic. How we shop has changed beyond recognition with the accelerated growth of online retailing and the need to avoid social interaction due to the disease. Nquiringminds data visualisation tools will explore and expose the fundamental issues that our high streets are facing, and we are proud to be part of this movement for change and improvement initiative in Ealing.
Anita Allott, Director, Nquiringminds
Noggin Property offers a new way to collect and share commercial property data; to give an up-to-date understanding and complete overview of high street properties. It will help councils and business owners drive the regeneration of town centres and create opportunities for new ideas to repurpose empty properties.
It allows users to take photos and add property data, notes and tags at their convenience to give an up to date record of local properties. By connecting up-to-date information sourced in the field, with existing databases of land ownership, council assets and current vacant properties, we can slow the growth of empty properties.
About the partner
This challenge is jointly presented by Ealing Council, the Ealing High Streets Taskforce, and West London Business. Ealing is the third largest London borough and one of the most diverse boroughs in the country. The Taskforce has been established to help businesses recover and rebuild thriving high streets for the future, including representation from businesses, trade associations and the three Business Improvement Districts, with a focus on collaboration, innovation and strategic thinking.
- Access to database of existing vacant units and land ownership.
- Access to database of council assets in town centres and high streets.
- Opportunity to embed new data collection processes into empty property rate relief registration (in accordance with GDPR requirements).
- Opportunity to work with a selected town centre or high street to test the impact of the tool.
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