At Andy Burnham Question Time in October, Burnham claimed: “We are coming after those landlords”. He has consequently announced a ‘Housing First‘ initiative to tackle homelessness in the city and the UK’s first Good Landlord’s Charter which will come into effect in Manchester next year.
There seems to be a sincere focus on landlords and renters in the current cultural zeitgeist. However, small businesses seem to have fallen through the cracks of this discourse. What landlord-related protections are in place for them?
Clearly, there are issues between landlords and small businesses just as there are between landlords and private renters. We need to look no further than the owners of Café Blah in Withington, who are facing an ongoing dispute with their landlords after being evicted from the property, allegedly without notice, over a month ago.
The question remains: why has the focus on landlords not yet been directed at small businesses?
I spoke with George Laws, a student activist who has been instrumental in a letter-writing campaign to Withington MP Jeff Smith to save Café Blah.
“People were outraged, people were really upset,” he said when I asked him about the community response to Café Blah’s closure. “Café Blah’s landlords came in one day and changed the locks and then they had 24 hours to move their entire business and livelihoods out of this building”.
The business owners, Adam Porrino and Tess Parkinson reported the same series of events on their Instagram story. They claimed that they were evicted from their property without proper notice and that their business had been “unfairly snatched away”.
This has reportedly happened after a year-long dispute with their landlords over how the rent on the property was due to increase by 68% and then go up a further 7.5% the following year.
But this phenomenon isn’t just limited to Café Blah.
At the beginning of this year, we saw the closure of Greens in Didsbury, which was a South Manchester institution for 33 years. It was run by TV chef Simon Rimmer who said the landlords had raised the rent by around 35%.
This seems to be occurring all over Manchester. In 2023, for the fourth year running, Manchester was the local authority with the greatest number of ‘business deaths’ in the Greater Manchester area with 3,620 businesses closing.
We need to seriously consider whether we want to protect our independent businesses, as all trends seem to point towards the death of the small business.
When I asked George why we should protect our independent businesses, he said: “There’s a problem in Manchester where students and young graduates really just move down Wilmslow Road. They start in Fallowfield – maybe they move to Withington – and when they’re looking for graduate jobs and opportunities, they move to Didsbury. It creates a very student-y bubble of mostly middle class, affluent, well meaning young adults and teenagers. I think that’s why students get a bad rap in Manchester… we are essentially gentrifying south Manchester”.
He pointed out that Café Blah “was for the community… Café Blah was involved in Withington Pride and involved in Party for the People”.
He fondly remembered the free biscuits which came with every coffee and smiled as he recalled the little details which made Café Blah such a special place. The café provided a space for up-and-coming bands, artists, and comics. The significant community response shows just how valued this venue was.
So, if small businesses are so important to the citizens of Manchester, then surely there must be work being done to protect them?
Andy Burnham announced the Good Landlord’s Charter on Friday October 18 2024 and introduced it as a voluntary scheme for landlords which will hold them to higher standards than the law does. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority estimates that tens of thousands of tenants will be brought under these additional protections in 2025, but this scheme has no mention of small businesses. In fact, in the 18-page document which lays this out, the phrases “commercial renters” and “small businesses” do not appear once.
The same is true of the Government’s new Renters Rights Bill. It would give a myriad of protections to private renters, including an end to Section 21 no-fault evictions which allow a landlord to evict a tenant from a property with two months’ notice, even if they had done nothing. However, this new bill contains no mention of commercial properties. It is now in the report stage at Parliament and, if it is passed, may become law between April and June 2025.
Café Blah’s local MP, Jeff Smith, has announced that “[s]mall, independent businesses are the heart of our local economy and it’s vital we do all we can to support them”.
However, with the number of small businesses closing throughout the city, we may wonder what is actually being done to protect small businesses. Many have claimed that the recent rise in National Insurance, which Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced in her most recent budget, will unfairly penalise small businesses. It is difficult to see what is being done to protect these pillars of local character.
“It’s a shame that he can’t do more”, George said about Andy Burnham.
When I asked him how Café Blah could be saved, he said: “It’s gonna be people in the community being annoyed and raising money and writing to MPs… we’re gonna have to fight”.
Should it be the responsibility of people in the community to organise protests and fundraisers to keep our small businesses afloat? We can only hope that the economic growth the new Government is seeking does not come at the expense of cultural institutions in our city whose presence in the community is invaluable.
