The latest update of the High Streets Recovery Tracker includes spend data up until the end of April and gives a sense of how spending in UK cities and towns is recovering as lockdown restrictions begin to lift.
On Monday 12 April, non-essential local businesses such as shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs partially reopened their doors to customers for the first time in four months. This was expected to bring some long-awaited relief for a number of high street businesses, whether in retail or the hospitality sector.
The latest update of the High Street Recovery Tracker with spend data up until the end of April in the UK’s 62 largest city centres tells us how this played out across the country.
Averaged across all city centres, customer spending now reaches 72 per cent of its pre-pandemic levels – up 50 percentage points compared to the week before the economy reopened. With the exception of Scottish cities where restrictions were lifted later in the month, the impact of the reopening on ‘physical’ spend, whether in shops, pubs or restaurants is visible everywhere up and down the country.
And there are signs of a vaccine-driven boost: overall spend recovery is 26 percentage points higher than what it was immediately after non-essential businesses last summer, despite the fact that hospitality businesses are now only allowed to open outdoors. By the end of April 2021, customer spending returned to pre-pandemic levels in 35 city centres, against less than five in early July 2020.
This one should not come as a surprise to anyone: not all places are experiencing the same recovery. A breakdown per city size shows that the story is still the same as last year’s: while small and medium-sized city centres are now approaching full recovery (more than 90 per cent recovery on average), larger city centres are not there yet (72 per cent). The city-by-city gap is shown on Table 1: while Huddersfield, Basildon and Blackburn are the cities with the strongest recovery (each of them above 115 per cent of pre-pandemic levels), London lags far behind and large cities like Birmingham, Newcastle and Birmingham are also in the bottom 10.
| Rank | City | April 2021 spend recovery (% of pre-lockdown levels) | Difference to summer 2020 reopening (percentage points) |
| 1 | Huddersfield | 119 | 19 |
| 2 | Basildon | 117 | 32 |
| 3 | Blackburn | 117 | 17 |
| 4 | Birkenhead | 117 | 12 |
| 5 | Mansfield | 117 | 29 |
| 6 | Middlesbrough | 115 | 35 |
| 7 | Warrington | 114 | 12 |
| 8 | Preston | 112 | 34 |
| 9 | Wakefield | 112 | 29 |
| 10 | Stoke | 112 | 47 |
| Rank | City | April 2021 spend recovery (% of pre-lockdown levels) | Difference to summer 2020 reopening (percentage points) |
| 53 | Manchester | 73 | 34 |
| 54 | Newcastle | 72 | 32 |
| 55 | Birmingham | 65 | 28 |
| 56 | Oxford | 62 | 29 |
| 57 | Aldershot | 56 | 2 |
| 58 | London | 53 | 26 |
| 59 | Dundee | 34 | -4 |
| 60 | Aberdeen | 24 | 0 |
| 61 | Glasgow | 18 | -12 |
| 62 | Edinburgh | 12 | 4 |
Note: April levels here refer to the week starting 18 April. Summer 2020 levels refer to an average of the last two weeks of June and first week of July 2020, to reflect the reopening of non-essential retail and then hospitality businesses.
Source: Beauclair, 2021.
Now, this does not mean that London and other large cities have not benefitted from the vaccine boost: in London, for instance, spend levels are already much higher than what they were in July 2020 – around 26 percentage points higher. This might reflect a greater confidence in public transport usage – backed by TFL data. The extent to which this is driven by greater inflows of shoppers or by a progressive return of workers to the office who then spend their money in the city centre is still uncertain, and the upcoming update of our High Street Tracker with footfall data will help understand that.
What it means, though, is that in these large city centres, a full recovery is unlikely to happen until more people go back to the office, given how reliant the retail and hospitality sectors are on workers spending their money on lunchtime sandwiches or evening drinks.
Finally, it is still unclear whether or not the overall boost in consumer spend levels is a short-term spike or the start of a long-term recovery pattern. So far, data shows that the initial jump in consumer spending when shops reopened was not sustained the following week: in every city, spend levels went down again on the week starting 18th April. The next update of the tracker, which will cover the reopening of indoor hospitality, will clarify that, so keep an eye on this space.
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