OPINION: Keeping it local

Word reaches my rheumy old ears about the Town Centre Mis-management’s latest contribution to their ‘Shop Local’ initiative that they’ve been pushing down our throats for the past umpteen months.

They have now launched a new scheme called ‘Love Rochdale’ and have given the work on this to a company from Rossendale!

Now I know that the trip to Rossendale isn’t exactly going to burn out the warp-drive on the Starship Enterprise but:

• It’s not local in the true sense of the term. 
• Placing the business with a firm from outside Rochdale is contrary to the whole ethos of both the ‘Love Rochdale’ and ‘Shop Local’ campaigns. 
• It sends out the signal that there are no local companies either capable of doing this work or willing to tender for it (this, my informants tell me, is incorrect in both cases).

God alone knows that there is a crisis of confidence in Rochdale town centre by local shoppers going back over years if not decades. A glance through the Forum section on Rochdale Online will serve to show that there is widespread dissatisfaction with Rochdale’s inability to provide a shopping centre that can pull in out-of-town shoppers in a way that has happened with surrounding locales. We really do need to keep things local and that needs not just to be the headline message but the underlying ethos at the heart of the way in which TCM approaches its mission.

We hear that TCM have to choose from companies on a list in order to get funding. Only problem here is that many of the businesses who could do this work didn’t even know there was a list in the first place! Certainly nobody from TCM bothered to tell them. In other towns, the public sector goes out of their way to pull in local businesses but in Rochdale, this appears not to be the case. Wasn’t it ever thus?

I am reminded here for some reason of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the plans informing earth-residents of the new inter-galactic bypass “was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Rochdale businesses need every bit of help they can get. TCM and other public bodies should be helping them to do this in every way that they can.

I don’t want to intrude on TCM’s private grief here by pointing out what a dismal, depressing and unrewarding shopping experience Rochdale town centre seems to present to many Rochdalians and out-of-town shoppers alike. It would be unfair and untrue to lay all the blame at its doorstep. However, let us please have some evidence of clear direction and joined-up thinking on this one.

The Rock Shopping Centre in Bury has just opened in a blaze of free TV, radio and press publicity. It is a bold venture and it is too early yet to say how successful it will be. When me and Mrs E visited the place last week, one thing in particular stood out and hit us right between the eyes. There was overwhelming and compelling evidence of real commitment and dynamism behind the project. Shoppers and businesses alike are excited by the development and are committed to making it work.

That is the sort of energy and vision we need in Rochdale. Come on TCM, get your thinking caps on, your fingers out and beware of that bloody leopard!