Analysis from our High Streets Recovery Tracker on how people react when remote-working guidance is lifted, and what that tells us about what to expect next.
Last month, the Prime Minister’s call to get people back to the office, as part of a broader plan to lift the ‘Plan B’ restrictions, made a lot of noise: many reported that civil servants faced growing pressure to return to the office, while banks and other big corporate companies also announced plans to get their staff back to their desks.
In the past two years, Centre for Cities closely monitored the return to the office in its High Street Recovery Tracker– which was updated yesterday with footfall data up until the end of January. So, are the calls from Westminster being heard by commuters? Using early insights from the past two weeks as well as data from the past two years, this blog looks at how people react when remote-working guidance is lifted, and what that tells us about what to expect next.
In the UK’s largest city centres, which have been the most affected by shifts to remote-working, weekday footfall is on a clear upward trend. It increased by 22 percentage points between the first and the last week of January, and by 14 percentage points in London (Figure 1). That said, the impact of the Government’s announcement is not clear: footfall increased at a higher rate during the first half of the month than in the following two weeks when the guidance was actually lifted; and overall, absolute levels of footfall remain below where they were last autumn. In London, for instance, activity is only back to where it was last September.
While the immediate impact on commute patterns is not clear-cut, it might be too early to tell: many employers may have decided to apply the new guidance from the start of the next month, which means more people will be coming back in February- as early TFL data seems to suggest.
Before January 2022, remote-working guidance had only been lifted twice. In August 2020, lockdown rules were eased by ‘giving employers more discretion over their workplace’, but it only had a small impact: weekday footfall levels only went up by four percentage points in the following two weeks, and no significant ‘back to work’ effect was seen in September either (Figure 1). Freedom Day in July 2021 triggered a stronger response, especially in cities like Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol. In the two weeks that followed, weekday footfall went up by 8 percentage points, and it grew consistently in the second half of the year. By the end of November, it reached 87 per cent of its pre-pandemic levels across the UK’s 11 ‘Core cities’.
Source: Locomizer. Note: the cities included in the “Core cities” group are: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield.
As Figure 1 shows, weekday activity is already going up at a higher pace now than immediately after Freedom Day. So, if these trends persist in the next few months like they did last autumn, then footfall should be close to its pre-pandemic levels in the next three months, across the “Core cities” group.
It’s a different story in London. The post-Freedom Day response was more muted, and footfall levels remain only halfway through recovery nearly six months later (Figure 1). Both in terms of increase rate or absolute levels of footfall, this month’s data shows that central London still clearly lags behind other large cities like Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol, which means it’ll take much longer to bounce back. Its strength (a wide commuter catchment area) continues to be its weakness as it’s those who live the furthest away who are the most reluctant to return to the office (Figure 2). Until they return, full recovery is unlikely.
Source: Locomizer
Does this growing divergence between the capital and other large cities mean that the work-from-home issue is soon to be a London-only problem, involving a longer-term ‘Covid shock’ for shops, bars and restaurants in the capital? Centre for Cities will keep tracking footfall in the months ahead, so keep an eye on this space.
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