Bradford city centre is only rlthe second most deserted town centrerl in the country.

and this is good news because .......

For a minute I thought I was gonna read that I had been banned.

Blimey! Wolverhampton must be really bad.

More great publicity for Bradford.

This could kick start bradford's recovery. a slogan of "It could be worse" spread all over will surely get the punters back?

Because it most certainly is. And that's that.

We are number two. We try harder...

(Apologies to Avis...)

Take that East St Louis!

Wolverhampton shares very many similarities with Bradford.

IMO Bradford is on the verge of becoming a "failed city".

How do you define that?

I think Bradford's got big problems but we need to be careful about bandying terms like that around.

Bit like a "failed school", I'd suggest. Come on...it just is not working as it is, is it? Inward investment looks to have all but dried up, as the report says the city centre is increasingly abandoned by those with alternatives, the only developments of note outside of the university etc seem to be...near the strategic road network. And Bradford is increasingly seen as a place to get round or through on the way to getting somewhere else.

Its a bloody travesty, given that when I first got my entry visa for Yorkshire in 1977 I lived in Leeds but its centre was a depressing place and I went to the vibrant Bradford for shopping and the like. As I'm sure you'd agree? Then someone gave Leeds "Development Area" status but not Bradford, and a few other gradual but ultimately fundamental changes took place, and look what happened? And the biggest joke of all was that the party that awarded Leeds DA status thought to obtain electoral advantage in Leeds by so doing, when instead all the credit in the minds of the public accrued to the their political opponents who controlled the council. Dumb and dumber...

And the solution? Surely the same as for the "failed school" analogy and also for the Leeds precedent...parachute in a new management and a shedload of central funding to incentivise inward investment and restore some sense of hope (if not yet pride) in the people of the district?

But, and mindful of what happened to the Tories in Leeds, how likely is that while the local authority remains controlled by the opponents of the governing party nationally?

I agree it's not working in Bradford but if you put a label like "failed city" on the place it'll never attract any investment. I know what you're getting at but I think "failed school" is a just a "catch all" term given by the media whenever a school is placed in special measures or has a bit of a bad reputation. As far as I know only Hull and maybe Donny have had the equivilent treatment for local authorities in this region. Once you start dishing out the labels it's harder to get rid of them. Nobody prints or broadcasts positive news if there's something more hard hitting around.

Maybe I'm just a bit sensitive but I know how bad publicity can spread about a place. For example, the student profile at Bradford Uni has changed massively in the past 10-12 years. Nowadays the place is mainly made up of students from Bradford itself or from abroad whereas up to about 98/99 it was mainly made up of students from elsewhere in the UK. This change came about over small number of years since the riots.

The riot coverage and the fact the the city was associated with rioting in the media every five minutes caused a massive shift in how the city was perceived from outside. That in turn had a big negative effect on the local economy.

I just don't want to see us giving out labels like "failed city" as they're likely to be seized upon and once it sticks that'll be the end of it. Sure, the city has some huge issues to deal with and it has been in decline for the best part of 50 years. It could do with the kind of boost that Leeds got in the 80s but it'll never have the chance if we're not careful.

Hopefully the next govt (likely to be Dave and Co the way things are looking) may be able to help given the current make up of the council. It needs a canny person on the side of Bradford to persuade the tories that it'd look very good if they could turn Bradford around and show it as a tory success story. It's about as an unlikely scenario as I can think of but you never know!

Couldnt Woverhampton reduce its vacancy rates by knocking down the empty shops.....?

Is that you at your most convincing?