So how do problems get solved?

That British retail is changing is obvious enough. The question is, well, what to do about it? Perhaps we should have a plan? Some people who don’t know much about it all, have no particular incentive to get it right, could impose their prejudices upon everyone else? Or, of course, we could not use politics to try to solve this problem:

More than half of the 497 department stores closed across Britain in the five years to November remain vacant,

Quite what such buildings should be used for next we don’t know. More to the point, that they’re - half of them - still empty means no one else does either. Perhaps they should become housing. Or the buildings razed and a park put in place. Or something else be sold from them, like go-kart rides.

The thing being that we have a system to work this out. It’s that market of course. Folks try all sorts of different things and somewhere along the line something that does in fact work will be stumbled across. At which point the greedy capitalists owning the other buildings will take note and try to do the same thing. The universe of possible solutions is best explored by those with the local knowledge and the incentives to conduct the experiments.

As The Observer tells us in fact:

Wolfson may have the best ideas about what comes Next for shops

Seems likely to us. Long time industry professional who is actually paid, daily, to work out what to do with shops might be just the person to work out what to do with shops. The contribution that politics can make to all of this is to give him, and all his contemporaries, the room and freedom to do that experimentation.

That is, hands off and leave it alone. As nurse used to say, if you keep picking at it you’ll only make it worse.