Our solution
As COVID revealed, retail doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. If offices are closed, or fewer people commute, retail suffers. A retail-only view is not enough.
More disruptively, when companies reconsider their processes for supporting Covid-19 social distancing, they will review everything from offices to the inter-relationship of jobs, remaking the structure and process of work. Just because you’re at a desk and could work from home doesn’t mean that job will still be required when your colleagues shift to remote.
For the City of London, home to 7,000 but place of work for 400,000, a 10% decline in commuting could result in the migration of 17,000 office jobs and almost 8,000 retail jobs. But when people work at home they need more from where they live. Even as places like the City of London, Westminster, Camden, Manchester and Exeter experience commercial decline equivalent to the loss of 30,000 office units and 20,000 retail units, other regions gain.
Whythawk was not directly involved in Levelling Up at all. We were never formally part of the process. However, we provided to aggregated datasets on commercial vacancy statistics for local authorities across England and Wales.
The data below are the referenced aggregate totals, medians and distributions for industrial, retail, leisure, and office commercial locations between October 2019 and July 2021 aggregated for each local authority in England and Wales. They are released under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Later it emerged that these were foundational data for decision support in allocating the funding. We were not involved in that process.
Outcomes
There are two methodology notes released by DLUHC: Levelling Up Fund: Prioritisation of places methodology note, July 2020 and Levelling Up Fund: Prioritisation of places methodology note, July 2021.
“The methodology was developed to help the Fund deliver its core objective of improving local communities by investing in local infrastructure that has a visible impact on people.”
Following queries from numerous local authorities concerned at the data and methods underpinning our aggregations, we produced a review for Barnsley to offer a public and auditable record of our methods. This seemed to be sufficient for the various stakeholders.
