Across our constituency, town centre regeneration is a long-running challenge – and an ongoing one. We’ve all seen the journey both Farnham and Bordon have been on, with the Brightwells site and the new town centre respectively, while discussions also remain ongoing in Haslemere about the future of the Fairground site.

Where our local projects are complete or part-complete, the sites are still far from the bustling, fully occupied community hubs that residents were originally promised.

No matter how many buildings go up, regeneration won’t succeed unless we get the fundamentals right. That means not just creating retail units and leisure facilities on paper, but ensuring there’s a thriving local economy ready to bring those places to life. And that’s where national policy matters.

I recently pressed the business and trade secretary on this very point. We’re asking small businesses and independent entrepreneurs to take a risk on new sites like Brightwells and in Bordon – but at the same time, the Government is making it harder to employ people by increasing national insurance and raising the cost of doing business. That sends the wrong message, at exactly the wrong time.

If we want to see these regeneration projects succeed, we must make it easier – not harder – for businesses to grow. The high street doesn’t need more empty units and shuttered shops. It needs local people who are willing to take a chance, open a café, start a shop, or launch a community venture. But those decisions depend on confidence – and a tax hike doesn’t exactly inspire it.

There’s no denying that some of the inertia in Brightwells and Bordon’s town centre developments is due to their complex administrative structures.

Brightwells is a joint project between Waverley Borough and Surrey County Councils, while Bordon’s much larger scheme involves multiple public bodies, including the Ministry of Defence.

But as Bordon’s new Sainsbury’s prepares to break ground this week, we have a real opportunity to inject momentum into the wider site. It mustn’t be a standalone success, it should be the start of something broader: a town centre that’s active, accessible, and appealing to both businesses and residents. And the same needs to happen in Farnham.

We’ve waited long enough for these schemes to deliver on their promise – and if the Government is serious about its ‘Plan for Change”’ it should start by backing communities like ours, where regeneration is still very much a work in progress.

I’ll keep backing local efforts to make our town centres thrive - but I won’t stop holding the national government to account. Without real support from Westminster, local ambition is left doing all the heavy lifting. And that’s how bold plans stall - not because of a lack of vision here, but a lack of leadership there.