The Portas Pilot project, intended to revive business in Croydon’s ancient Surrey Street Market, has been a failure.
In disguise? Maybe Mary Portas does not want to be recognised as a “High Street guru”?
That’s effectively the admission of Mary Portas, Prime Minister David Cameron’s “retail guru” and self-proclaimed “Queen of the High Street”.
It is also the view of one of Portas’s growing band of critics, and it is the implicit view of the chair of the Croydon Portas Town Team, who has resigned that position admitting to “frustrations” in failing to get anything done.
It is not just the Portas Pilot in Croydon – where 18 months ago the local government department doled out £100,000, as it did with 26 other such schemes around the country – that has failed. But Portas denies that the failure is anything to do with her.
And the ex-chair of the Croydon team, who is now spending more time running his pay-day loan shop on Surrey Street, says it isn’t his fault or that of his committee, either.
Kez Hassan, who had volunteered for the Town Team role when public money was being made available, did mention in an interview this morning that he had written to “Big” Eric Pickles, the local government minister, and his colleague, Grant Shapps. Neither of whom had bothered responding, and neither of whom bothered to accept an invitation to visit Surrey Street to see the work being done with the public money that they had dished out.
A civil service flunky had answered, apparently, telling Hassan and his chums that they needed to resolve matters locally. So the failure of the Portas Pilot scheme is clearly not the fault of Pickles or Shapps, and evidently is not their problem, either.
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Singers from Croydon and the surrounding area will be celebrating Age and Experience at Croydon Minster from 2.30pm on October 6.
