Scottish Government

What are Learning Points?

Learning Points share what people have learned from their experience in regeneration - from people working or talking together, or from research into issues and evaluation of what is happening. Learning Points can help people and organisations to improve their practice through identifying what works and what doesn't.

What is this Learning Point about?

This Learning Point is developed from an event held in November 2009, which focused on performance management in towns and the need for robust quantitative and qualitative data to enable monitoring and evaluation. It brought together people from the public, private and voluntary sectors across Scotland to debate issues and share their experiences.

The event focused on 'Milestone', an online performance measurement and benchmarking service for town and city centres which offers the prospect of facilitating the delivery of town centre monitoring reports and providing relevant information to inward investors, so as to support their decision making. Milestone may provide a way of understanding more fully what actually drives town centre performance and suggests the need for supporting policies to protect and enhance the future of a town centre.

The event was hosted by the Town Centres and Local High Streets Learning Network in partnership with the Association for Town Centre Management (ATCM).

What are the important issues?

Currently there are very challenging conditions for town centre occupiers. Occupiers and inward investors want and need evidence of a town's performance but this is largely unfulfilled. At the same time there is recognition of need for evidence of performance to inform and support national policy for town centres since the early 1990's, but there are many difficulties in gathering robust evidence of performance.

What are the challenges facing our town centres?

Issues around gathering robust evidence of a town centres performance

• Information can be very expensive, spread over a range of data collection agencies (public and private) and not easily accessible.
• The variety of people who collect data and the different spatial levels they collect it for, often lead to inconsistencies between towns, making benchmarking problematic if not impossible.
• There are technical challenges in gathering data as well as resource and other costs involved.
• Knowing what and how much data to collect, and how often to collect it for that data to be useful, can be problematic, as is how to convert the information into useful intelligence.
• It is not always clear if data is being used to inform and/or monitor and evaluate town centre strategies. Or if data collection should be about more than town centre management - rather, about "management of place."
• Getting standardised town centre Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) would be very valuable but that would require a greater consensus amongst Local Authorities and support from central government.

What is known already?

Based on the Association of Town Centre Management Healthcheck Toolkit, seminar participants identified what they considered relevant data for collection under seven Key Performance Indicator (KPI) areas:

What have we learned?

• Performance Management is about linking strategy to real results. But there is also the dilemma of how do you find the money and the staff to undertake such intensive data collection and analysis.
• If Scotland's towns and cities are to continue to prosper and remain at the heart of our communities, then it is critical to understand trends in performance. Appropriate strategies can then be implemented to ensure their long term vitality and viability. Indeed, the need to monitor performance has long been recognised in planning national policy for town centres.
• Regenerating and ensuring the continued vitality and viability of a town centre is not just about town centre management - it's about the overall management of a place, which requires good partnership working with input from many stakeholders.
• There are two basic categories of Performance Management information that can be gathered in order to understand the 'current picture' of a town:
• Objective information: Based on facts and figures and drawn from professional sources, ie the experts and researchers who specialise in the topics a local partnership is interested in.
• Subjective information: Based on views and feelings. This data will come from a wider cross-section of the stakeholder network, typically local people and groups.
• The sources of gathering objective data are considerable - a range of sources were discussed by delegates at the workshop.
• Benchmarking town centre performance would be very helpful in assessing and managing performance as well as providing a baseline against which town centre strategies can be evaluated.

Apparent strengths of Milestone as a tool to support performance management in towns

• Milestone is designed to bring data together from several different sources. Key to this is the bringing together of property, industry and retailer information as well a Government statistics. This is an important step forward in assembling data for town centres.
• There is a myriad of information available - however there does not appear to be an effective way of capturing, using and storing this information. Milestone appears to offer that potential.
• Milestone will incorporate the majority of town centres in Scotland. This seems to be sufficiently wide-ranging to provide a robust and consistent framework for monitoring and benchmarking certain performance measures throughout Scotland.
• The cost for each Local Authority and their partners of acquiring separately the range of data that is contained within Milestone is significant. Milestone allows for the data to be bought 'in bulk' therefore reducing costs.
• Milestone provides each town with the same data, meaning that towns are using the same Key Performance Indicators and therefore ensuring consistency in performance measurement.
• Milestone could assist in reducing the lengthy and complicated processes that local authorities would have to go through to compile relevant data and present it in a meaningful way.

Apparent weaknesses of Milestone as a tool to support performance management in towns

Whilst Milestone appears to offer a step change in the type of Performance Management data available for a town, it does appear to have some drawbacks:

• The data relates mainly to town centres and not shopping centres and retail warehouse parks. This is the fundamental premise for Milestone, ie that it is a service to measure and benchmark the performance of town centres as this is the sector for which there has been no comprehensive performance measurement capability.
• The town centre boundaries have not been agreed with Local Authorities but defined by the data providers. Some of the data does not relate to a town centre boundary (eg the NOMIS and Valuation Office data) but more at a local authority wide area.
• Some data is not available for very small town centres. However, data on catchment population and spend, and on the ranking and quality indicators for town centres is available for around 4,000 town centres across the UK. This will enable even small towns to have some benchmarking capability. In itself, this represents a step change from what is currently available for small town centres.
• Because multiples are more commonly situated in town centres and because multiple representation is more widely monitored, the independent retail sector is likely to be under-represented in terms of data availability.

What next?

• There appears to be the need to investigate Milestone in more detail in order to focus on the particular data requirements that Scottish towns have. The Town Centres and Local High Streets Learning Network will be taking this forward over the coming months.
• Town centres do not figure explicitly in Single Outcome Agreements but they are crucial to the well being of local communities. Any Key Performance Indicators developed for town centres therefore should have an appropriate fit with Single Outcome Agreements.
• Good practice examples highlighting where local authorities in Scotland are effectively collecting, interpreting and analysing performance management data on their towns needs to be shared widely. An example of this is the Performance Management work that Fife Council is undertaking.
• There is a need to investigate how Key Performance Indicators are measured and how we can agree a standardised - yet flexible - methodology across local authorities. Such an approach would allow for benchmarking within Scotland and enable lessons and learning about towns; performance to be shared more effectively.
• The Town Centres and Local High Streets Learning Network has brought together two working groups to look, in more detail, at Performance Management in towns. Members of the groups will work together to tackle a range of issues and challenges in developing and implementing effective performance management frameworks. It is expected the findings from these groups will be published by March 2011.
• You can join the learning network by visiting www.partnersinregeneration or by contacting the network coordinator, Yvonne Gavan on 0141 271 3734.

Scottish Centre for Regeneration

This document is published by the Scottish Centre for Regeneration, which is part of the Scottish Government. We support our public, private and voluntary sector delivery partners to become more effective at:

• regenerating communities and tackling poverty
• developing more successful town centres and local high streets
• creating and managing mixed and sustainable communities
• making housing more energy efficient
• managing housing more efficiently and effectively

We do this through:

• coordinating learning networks which bring people together to identify the challenges they face and to support them to tackle these through events, networking and capacity building programmes
• identifying and sharing innovation and practice through publishing documents detailing examples of projects and programmes and highlighting lessons learned
• developing partnerships with key players in the housing and regeneration sector to ensure that our activities meet their needs and support their work

Scottish Centre for Regeneration
Scottish Government
Highlander House
58 Waterloo Street
Glasgow
G2 7DA
Tel: 0141 271 3736
Email: contactscr@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Website: www.partnersinregeneration.com

The views expressed in learning points are not necessarily shared by the Scottish Centre for Regeneration or the Scottish Government.

May 2010