The Future of City Centres: A few thoughts

At hot topic at business forums in Leicester at the moment appears to be the future of ours and other City Centres. There are further meetings of both Leicester Business Voice and Procon at the end of February on this issue.

 

The conversation at present appears to be relatively negative and has been so for a few years now. Clearly, the internet has wiped out a significant proportion of the retail offer of most centres and latterly the increased trend for working for home has only added to those woes in City centres.

 

Inevitably, the discussions in business circles tend to be by middle class, middle aged people such as myself, and this can be somewhat biased.

 

At a recent Friends of New Walk meeting I opined that I had visited the centre of Leicester recently on a Tuesday night and certainly on the Gallowtree Gate axis it was busy on a day I did not expect. I did remark that it was a very different demographic from myself being young and significantly of Asian background. While I was very positive about this, the aspect that made it a bit uncomfortable for me was the absolute proliferation of cycles and similar in the pedestrian areas, frequently travelling at significant speed. I did not feel relaxed and felt I had to keep my wits about me all the time.

 

Cllr Liz Sahu picked me up on this at the meeting by saying I had missed that it is also largely male (probably me being a male!). And of course she is right.

 

I think this focus on a limited demographic is a weakness, discouraging a wider range of visitors to act as customers for greater variety of businesses. If the profile is young and male it can be a more combustible environment prone to behaviours, which discourages other groups visiting when there are a limited range of people in view.

 

Parallel to this I was reflecting on a report of immediately before covid by the Centre for Cities thinktank. From memory it reviewed the largest 36(?) centres in the UK and their ‘office’ offer. Leicester, I believe, was the second lowest proportionate to its size in the UK. This is a big weakness of our city, as such employees are generally in better paid jobs than the average and have a clear opportunity before and after work, as well as at lunchtime to visit the plethora of retail, leisure and hospitality businesses. They also breed more familiarity with the City making it more likely they will visit at other times as well. And, of course, provide greater spread to the demographic issue flagged up above.

 

Since Covid the numbers of office workers actually in situ in the City has plummeted. Many office based businesses struggle to get their experienced employees to return citing the benefits of teaching and supporting junior staff and new starters; better collaborative working; greater management direction; and improved productivity (studies from Goldman Sachs to my small business size cite that overall there is a 25% reduction in productivity with full home working). I was very heartened to read at the end of January of an Employment Tribunal case where a senior manager at UK’s financial regulator, the FCA, was ordered back to work because of the business benefit, even though it was acknowledged that her work, as such, was satisfactory.  

 

I was also heartened to read that Sadiq Khan, worried about the detrimental effect of the WFH movement on the London economy, was looking at ways to incentivise working in the office, like cheaper travel, on the highest days for working from home.

 

So, in this perfect storm of challenges for the city centres, I don’t pretend to have many answers.

 

But we do need:

 

Senior businesses leaders, as well as the large public organisations based in the city, need to take the lead on getting staff back to the office to both support all the secondary businesses,  as well as broaden the demographic making the City more comfortable to women, older people and affluent people from outside the City who have more disposable income.

 

In Leicester we must continue to try and improve our transport offer as currently because of the tram and the greater public control of buses we lag behind Nottingham.

 

We need some way of achieving national control and enforcement of speeding and pavement riding of electric bikes / scooters.

 

With the changing patterns of working we need to understand how we can improve the whole office environment to make it more attractive to staff and conducive to the advantages of office working such as training, company cohesion and collaborative working.