One way to understand what’s happening on Britain’s high streets is to look at where risk now sits. Demand hasn’t disappeared, but it has thinned out. Discretionary spend is fragmented across online platforms, out-of-town retail and experiences, and is less anchored to physical place. For small, single-site businesses, that makes revenue more volatile and harder to predict. Their cost base has moved in the opposite direction. Energy costs spiked sharply in 2021–22 and remain well above pre-pandemic levels. Labour costs have risen through successive minimum wage increases, with further uplifts already signalled. Raw materials show similar pressure - global coffee prices, for example, have reached near multi-decade highs. For a small café, that’s a triple squeeze: paying more for beans, more to heat the premises, and more in wages, all while competing for a consumer under pressure. What matters isn’t any one cost in isolation. It’s that financial volatility and operational burden have been pushed downwards - away from institutions and onto the smallest actors least able to absorb them. Demand fluctuates. Obligations don’t. The instinctive response is more policy intervention - new funds, pilots, incentives. But the deeper problem isn’t neglect. It’s that the environment increasingly makes starting, sustaining, or retrying something feel disproportionate to the risk. You can see this dynamic clearly in Bedford. has run multiple ventures, including overseeing the rise of Real Bedford FC - a capital-intensive, operationally complex project with uncertain returns. And yet, after opening a café and funding a private security pilot in the town centre, he chose not to open another high-street business - despite having capital available - because the conditions no longer felt proportionate or navigable. That decision wasn’t a retreat from enterprise. It was a response to the environment. British high streets now expose not just decline, but the erosion of confidence in the act of trying - not just for well-resourced serial entrepreneurs, but for first-time founders and small operators deciding whether to take space and test an idea.

I’ve been thinking about Britain’s high streets this week. Since 2020, “high street” has appeared more than 4,000 times in Parliament. Reviews, pilots, new powers and billions in funding. And yet many town and city centres continue to hollow out. That disconnect keeps pointing me back to a structural misdiagnosis. We tend to treat the high street as a retail, leisure or property problem to be managed. But for the people who might open something there, it’s a risk environment - a place where you decide whether starting, or sustaining, a business is worth it at all. This isn’t just about footfall or funding. It’s about confidence: the belief that opening a café, restaurant, shop or workspace won’t be unfairly penalised by forces outside the owner’s control. Take a small 20-cover restaurant. Demand fluctuates. Margins are thin. But labour, rates, compliance and other fixed obligations don’t flex much when conditions change. Time, money and attention get pulled into managing risk rather than experimenting, adapting or growing. It's a mismatch. This isn't something policy tweaks or funding alone can fix. It feels more like a breakdown in proportionality - where the downside of trying no longer feels viable, even when the idea itself is sound. I wrote something longer exploring this, if useful: https://open.substack.com/pub/orientationfrom/p/the-risk-britain-is-no-longer-willing?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web