NEWPORT City Council leader, Dimitri Batrouni, said the city centre needs to change what it is offering in order to keep up with the times and said it needs to offer experiences people cannot get from online shopping.

“The market has changed, consumer habits have changed and the city centre has not kept up with that consumer change,” said Cllr Batrouni on a recent podcast on Business News Wales hosted by former First Minister Carwyn Jones.

Cllr Batrouni said: “The old days of going in to buy your clothes, Newport was sort of built on that. It has got huge retail offer, which is not fit for the 21st century we are in now."

The podcast focused on the retail challenges facing Newport and it also featured Newport Now Business Improvement District (BID) representative Kevin Ward and entrepreneur and owner of the Kingsway lease, Niall Leighton-Boyce. 

Cllr Batrouni said the problem with high street shopping is the convenience of online shopping, saying: “I am guilty as everyone else, you shop on your phone and it’s going to be an ever-increasing trend. This is not going to diminish. People, rightly, want convenience.”

Cllr Batrouni, Mr Ward and Mr Leighton-Boyce said Newport city centre has to offer experiences that give consumers something more personal than online shopping.

“It’s got to be about experiences, about things you can’t do online,” said Cllr Batrouni.

He said they are trying to create “almost like a European-style social experience, which you can’t recreate on your couch watching Netflix and buying everything on Amazon.”

The council set up a cross party working group and Cllr Batrouni said: "I want to listen and see what I need to hear” to shape what the council should do. 

The council has been trying to increase footfall through events like the winter wonderland and the food festival. The food festival in particular is a way to provide a consumer experience which cannot be found online. 

Cllr Batrouni said: “A lot of residents talk about the city centre and a lot of vacant shops because of that retail drop off and they have an idea of it returning back to what it was in the 90s and the early 2000s and that is just not possible.”

Newport Conservative campaigner, Michael Enea, criticised Cllr Batrouni, saying: “Unlike our new Council Leader Cllr Batrouni, I do believe the City Centre can return to its ‘boom years’ of the late-90s / early-2000s. I do believe in optimism. I do believe in setting high targets coupled with hard work and determination.”

Mr Enea criticised what Cllr Batrouni said on the podcast, saying: “Not all towns and cities are going through what Newport has gone through.”

Cllr Batrouni said the changes he wants to see in Newport cannot be expected to happen overnight, but he said: “Newport has got a lot of things going for it.”