Crunch time for Yorkshire towns and cities; here’s why – Andrew Carter

Household names such as Debenhams and Topshop have vanished, leaving only boarded-up shells and, as this year’s Cities Outlook 2022 research found, businesses in central Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield have lost more than half a year’s potential takings as shoppers, diners and workers stayed at home.

Clearly, in the short-term at least, the pandemic has been devastating for businesses up and down Yorkshire. Many cafes, pubs and shops that previously catered to Leeds’s office workers or York’s tourists found themselves without customers overnight as they turned into ghost towns.

In Yorkshire, central Leeds was worst hit by the restrictions, with shops, restaurants and bars there missing out on 39 weeks’ worth of potential sales. Despite the Government support on offer many went under and, as a result, one in five storefronts in the city centre are now sitting empty. It is a similar story across many of Yorkshire’s cities and towns.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Public health experts are now cautiously saying that the UK could finally be approaching the end of the pandemic and I am confident that visitor footfall and consumer spending levels will soon adjust to a post-pandemic ‘normal’ as consumer confidence returns this year.

However I am concerned about Yorkshire’s smaller and less affluent places. While high street businesses in places such as Huddersfield, Wakefield and Barnsley have been largely shielded from the worst effects of the pandemic by Government support – businesses in central Huddersfield lost just 12 weeks of sales to Leeds’s 39 – they are leaving it with exactly the same problems that they had at the start: a lack of good job opportunities, low educational attainment and a weak local private sector.

For people there, the post-pandemic normal must not look the same as pre-pandemic one. This is not an easy problem to fix. For the last two years the Government has been trying to find a solution in the form of its levelling up agenda: a much-promised and long-awaited White Paper setting out exactly how it plans to level up the country has been delayed several times and, as I understand it, has undergone several redrafts.

We are now expecting it to be published imminently, but as publication date draws nearer, I am increasingly concerned that it will be a triumph of short-term political strategising over genuine long-term economic change.

Too often when I hear policy makers and political commentators talk about how to level up struggling high streets, town and city centres in a post-pandemic world they lean towards easy cosmetic quick fixes – hanging baskets, benches, pop-up food markets.

While these are nice initiatives, they ignore the core reason why high streets struggle in the first place: the wider local economy is not strong enough to offer people the disposable income needed to sustain shops on a local high street or in a town centre.

Addressing this problem needs to be at the centre of post-pandemic plans to level up Yorkshire’s less affluent high streets, town and city centres. It is no coincidence that there are more than twice as many people in Barnsley with no qualifications than in York, so most importantly, addressing this means investing substantially more in adult education to provide people 
with the foundation they need 
to go ahead and get jobs that 
offer them good salaries that sustain a thriving local high street.

Levelling up will also need to consider how to attract more businesses and jobs into the local area. This must not be a top-down process; instead it should be led by people and communities within Yorkshire. The region’s two metro mayors – Tracy Brabin and Dan Jarvis – and other council leaders have the local knowledge to link up education providers with people and employers and so should be given the power and resources that they need to play a central role in growing their local private sectors.

None of these are quick fixes, and the challenges facing businesses won’t be solved by the next election, or the one after that, or even the one after that. However, upskilling people across Yorkshire and putting more money in their pockets at the end of the month is the only way to really support Yorkshire’s high street businesses in a post-pandemic world.

Andrew Carter is chief executive of Centre for Cities.

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