I regularly visit my local town centre. What I find there are numerous empty units, boarded windows, talk of a regeneration masterplan displayed on the boarded up windows of a retailer that itself closed sometime ago. The notices about renewal are perhaps more visible than the renewal itself.
I mention this not as a criticism of any place or institution, but because it raised a question I have not been able to shake. New polling published this week suggests that universities remain the UK’s single best collective asset for economic and social prosperity, but that they will only fulfil that potential if they demonstrate tangible impact in people’s lives. The high street, it seems to me, is exactly where that tangibility gets tested. And the results of that test are not always comfortable reading.
The civic claim and what it rests on
The civic university movement has gathered real momentum. Universities UK, HEPI, the Civic University Network and the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper have all articulated versions of the same ambition: that universities should act as anchor institutions, embedded in their communities and driving inclusive local growth. My own local university does this with genuine commitment. It has a Civic Partnership Agreement, contributes over 140,000 staff and student hours annually to community projects and is actively supporting its city’s bid for UK City of Culture 2029. These are not trivial commitments.
And yet a scoping review published by City-REDI at the University of Birmingham in 2024 found that university civic impact assessments are typically inconsistent and fail to capture the full picture. A Centre for Cities report from July 2025, drawing on millions of anonymised card transactions and retail vacancy data across 62 UK cities and towns, found shop vacancy rates above 18% in Bradford and 19% in Newport. Both cities have significant university presence. The report identified low local spending power, excess retail floorspace and spending leakage to larger nearby cities as the principal causes. It did not suggest universities were responsible. But it did suggest that the relationship between higher education presence and local economic health is considerably more complicated than the anchor institution narrative tends to imply.
The boundary problem
There is a structural issue here that I think deserves more attention than it usually gets. Civic partnership agreements, anchor institution strategies and place-based engagement plans are almost invariably drawn along administrative boundaries, following the local authority footprint within which a university sits. That is entirely logical. Universities naturally engage with the partners, councils and communities that share their immediate geography.
But economic decline does not follow administrative boundaries. The communities that most need economic presence, skills investment and civic anchor activity are often those that sit just outside the frame, in neighbouring boroughs or satellite towns that are close in every practical sense but absent from the institutional map. When I walk through my local town centre, I am not, in administrative terms, in the same place as my local university. That gap sounds technical. In practice it can mean a struggling community falls outside the natural reach of the institution that is, in every meaningful sense, its closest anchor.
This is not a criticism of universities. The boundary problem is a governance and policy design issue, and institutions cannot be expected to solve unilaterally what regional and national frameworks have not resolved. But it does raise questions about how civic purpose is defined, where accountability sits and whether the metrics used to assess civic contribution are drawing the map in the right place.
What the high street asks of governance
Civic missions tend to appear in strategy documents with considerably more confidence than it appears on risk registers. The question of whether an institution is genuinely making a difference to people nearby, not in aggregate economic statistics but in the texture of everyday experience, rarely surfaces as a governance accountability question. It probably should.
The new UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman suggested this week that effective research policy cannot be about doing everything. The same logic applies to civic engagement. Institutions that try to claim impact everywhere risk demonstrating it nowhere visible. The more useful governance question may not be ‘what is our civic contribution?’ but rather ‘who, specifically, can see the difference we are making, and where?’ If the answer to that question points to an economic impact assessment rather than to something a local resident would recognise, it warrants reflection.
The Centre for Cities report recommended moving away from cosmetic attempts to save the high street towards strategic investment in repurposing excess retail space for offices, housing and improved public spaces. Universities are well placed to contribute to that kind of repurposing, through graduate retention, knowledge exchange with local businesses, skills provision that addresses labour market gaps and the cumulative effect of educated young people choosing to stay. Whether those contributions are being directed where they are most needed, rather than where they are most easily measured, is a question governance structures might usefully ask more often.
A question worth sitting with
I have no tidy conclusion to offer here. The relationship between universities and the health of local economies is shaped by forces well beyond institutional control. Regional inequality, the growth of online retail, business rates pressures and decades of uneven investment have all contributed to the decline of town centres across the country. Universities did not create those conditions.
But if the polling evidence is right that universities must demonstrate their value in ways people can feel, the sector may need to think more carefully about where the frame of civic accountability begins and ends. The communities most in need of an anchor may be the ones most likely to find themselves sitting just outside it.
What would it mean for your institution to define its civic reach by need rather than by administrative boundary? And who in your governance structure is asking that question?