How has spending recovered in our town and city centres?
The Centre for Cities High Street Recovery Tracker now includes data on spending. How does this relate to footfall?
The Centre for Cities High Street Recovery Tracker now includes data on spending. How does this relate to footfall?
The latest update of our High Street Recovery Tracker included a new set of data on spend. It helps us to understand further how local economies are bouncing back from the lockdown, and how this differs from place to place. But this new addition also helps address an essential question: how are footfall and spend related to each other, and how does that relationship vary between cities up and down the country?
Spend fell with footfall going into the lockdown, and tracked it fairly consistently across the period. Since the easing of lockdown began in June, spend has recovered slightly faster than footfall, which no doubt will be welcome news to many high street businesses.
Figure 1: Overall recovery and spend index — all city average
Source: Locomizer, Beauclair (2020)
Compare Blackpool and Brighton for instance. Blackpool has the highest footfall recovery in the country but is currently 22/63 in terms of how quickly spend is recovering, relative to pre-lockdown levels.
Figure 2: Blackpool overall recovery and spend index
Source: Locomizer, Beauclair (2020)
In Brighton, the opposite holds true. Footfall hasn’t yet recovered to pre-lockdown levels but spend has surpassed it. This suggests that those that are in Brighton city centre now spend more on average than they would have done before.
Figure 3: Brighton overall recovery and spend index
Source: Locomizer, Beauclair (2020)
Some small consolation for large city centres is that while footfall has remained very low, they have some of the highest ratios of spending relative to footfall. Most of the top 10 city centres on this measure are large ones, as the table below shows. This suggests that those who are coming in are spending more than in smaller city centres. Conversely, in a number of smaller cities, including seaside towns like Southend or Blackpool, the relationship between footfall and spend is much weaker. This suggests that while the good weather and unease about travelling abroad has boosted footfall in seaside locations, it hasn’t translated into a one-to-one increase in spending.
Table 1: The ratio of footfall to spending
| Rank | City | Top 10 spend per footfall | Rank | City | Bottom 10 spend per footfall |
| 1 | Cardiff | 1.9 | 1 | Blackpool | 0.8 |
| 2 | London | 1.8 | 2 | Doncaster | 0.8 |
| 3 | Birmingham | 1.8 | 3 | Birkenhead | 0.8 |
| 4 | Glasgow | 1.7 | 4 | Southend | 0.9 |
| 5 | Liverpool | 1.6 | 5 | Basildon | 0.9 |
| 6 | Reading | 1.6 | 6 | Chatham | 0.9 |
| 7 | Manchester | 1.5 | 7 | Milton Keynes | 0.9 |
| 8 | Middlesbrough | 1.5 | 8 | Slough | 1.0 |
| 9 | Nottingham | 1.5 | 9 | Telford | 1.0 |
| 10 | Leeds | 1.5 | 10 | Sunderland | 1.0 |
Source: Locomizer, Beauclair (2020)
Interestingly, the composition of where spending comes from is very similar to pre-lockdown levels in large city centres. In Manchester, for instance, 25 per cent of spend was coming from people living outside the city before the lockdown, and it is now 26 per cent. While clearly this is 26 per cent of a much smaller number, it appears that the overall fall in spend and footfall is a result of a drop off in people coming from both within and outside of the city, rather than simply a matter of people not making longer distance trips.
What the data doesn’t yet show is how spend patterns and their relationship with footfall are affected by policy interventions such as the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme. The next data released later this month will answer that, so watch this space.
For more details about data and the methodology, see here.
Leave a comment
Be the first to add a comment.