Cancellation of Harrogate Christmas market will see businesses go to the wall - Yorkshire Post Letters

I AM very concerned to learn that Harrogate Christmas market may be cancelled and hope the implications for traders, and local businesses, will be considered.

We have taken a stall on the market since it began and it has been very successful for us. This year it is more important than ever because of the effects of the pandemic.

Last year, in common with all event traders, we lost 85 per cent of our gross income so this year it is essential that now everything is opening up we are able to start making income again.

If not, the knock on effect will be for businesses to go to the wall, lessening the taxes paid to the Government.

This is particularly important. We can get out of the debt incurred by the pandemic in two ways.

Either get the economy going again, increase GDP and therefore tax take – or we can cut spending, impacting on the less fortunate and the public employees, and watch the number of redundancies creep up.

We also have a shop on Montpellier Parade. It’s best week is the Christmas Market week.

Like all bricks and mortar shops, things are not easy because, during the pandemic, we were shut down.

Since reopening, things have been sticky. Fortunately we have more than one string to our bow and, therefore, we can choose whether to keep the shop open.

Should we decide that it is not worth it, this will leave yet another empty shop on the High Street and we may well take this option if Harrogate Borough Council take the wrong decision.

To this end, I really do feel that we should all pull together and do our bit to offset the effects of the pandemic on business and public finances – this includes local authorities.

It would be nice to get the country back to the ‘can do’ society that we were prior to the pandemic rather than the over cautious ‘can’t do’ society that we are seeing everywhere. We certainly didn’t become one of the major countries in the world by looking for reason not to do things.

I would therefore ask HBC to seriously consider the implications of any negative decisions in this matter.

Quite a lot of the shops are on the edge and it would only take one push and there could be an exodos of good traders in the best area of town, impacting on the other stores and the hotels.

If visitors come to a derelict town, they won’t come back.

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today. Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you’ll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers. Click here to subscribe.