Here's how to save shops clinging on for Easter - Kevin Buckle

With less than a week to Christmas Edinburgh city centre shops are reporting that sales are giving no reason for optimism and even a rush in the final few days will make little difference now.

Even an unlikely last-minute Christmas rush will not be enough to help some retailers, says Kevin Buckle

With those shops that at least think they will make it to Easter, when hopefully the vaccine programme will start to have had a positive effect, trying to plan for the year ahead is fraught with difficulty.

Some things are certain. No matter how hard the hospitality industry is suffering now it is better organised and positioned to stage a recovery. You only have to look at any organisation involved with promoting Edinburgh and it will be dominated by those involved in accommodation, food and drink and attractions.

If questioned, and they rarely are, these sectors will tell you that once they bring people to Edinburgh shopping will simply follow.

This is the logic used by everybody from Open Streets to the Christmas market that claim to improve business for shops simply by improving footfall but never actually ask the shops for any verification.

Within the retail sector some areas are more organised than others and the big player in the city centre is the Essential Edinburgh business improvement district (BID). The much smaller West End BID looks likely to fold and the Old Town BID failed to get the backing it needed to be established so it will be impossible for any of these areas to have a coordinated plan of action.

I have argued for some time that what the city centre needs is one large BID covering all the businesses in the city centre and there has never been a better time or indeed reason for that to happen.

Roddy Smith the CEO of Essential Edinburgh won’t thank me as he already has more than enough on his plate but what is needed is a small team working under Roddy which is initially funded by Edinburgh Council as it is simply not feasible, given the fragility of businesses already, to expect something like this to be initially funded by a business levy.

While hopefully it is also the right time to rethink how business rates are calculated it is certainly unthinkable that they can be reintroduced in any great measure in April.

This may seem like a large investment by the council in what are essentially commercial businesses but I’m sure that any investment now will be repaid many times over in the long term.

If city centre retail is ever to recover in a meaningful way Edinburgh Council needs to show the kind of enthusiasm it shows for other projects and the best way to do this is to build on the base already established by Essential Edinburgh and unify all of the city centre in one BID.

Hospitality will eventually bounce back and Essential Edinburgh will at least have resources to face the many challenges but without a coordinated plan and support retail in the Old Town may never recover.