We need a council plan to boost business in city after Covid - Kevin Buckle

I was first asked to write for the paper after my comments on social media about council plans for the Grassmarket post-pedestrianisation failing abysmally, then similar arts-related plans for King’s Stables Road.

Some time after that I was asked if I would like to write a regular column and my first thought was would people really want to hear me constantly pointing out how the council were getting things wrong albeit along with some more positive arts related stories. Very kindly it was pointed out that all I had said in previous columns had proved to be true.

Nice as this was to hear I felt obliged to point out that being right was easy when all I had to do was look out of my window. For those who don’t know Avalanche had moved to the Grassmarket as part of the council’s arts plan for the area and spent over three years seeing very little happen indeed.

I’m now getting a sense of déjà vu on a much larger scale. Admittedly I don’t get to look out on the city centre from inside the Waverley Mall but that is hardly necessary now to understand the problems the high street faced before the pandemic and is currently facing now.

The collapse of two major retail players this week will just be the start of an avalanche (sorry!) of big names falling if politicians continue to fail to understand the economic consequences of their actions. The current focus on small local businesses is clearly well deserved but it must be remembered that part of the consideration in saving businesses is saving jobs and these two retailers alone wiped out over twenty five thousand jobs in one fell swoop.

At the local level there really only seems to be a handful of Edinburgh councillors who appear to understand that the administration’s focus is skewed far too much in other directions which sometimes are even to the detriment of business. Even before Covid I’ve heard councillors enthuse that the new Edinburgh St James Quarter will account for up to thirty per cent of business in the city centre without any awareness that most of this business won’t be newly created and therefore must come at the expense of other city centre businesses.

Even when the council do have a plan as they did to encourage a more diverse range of businesses on The Royal Mile they don’t follow through and today the number of shops that might possibly appeal to locals are few and far between.

With a council that failed to understand businesses needs and the pressures on the high street even before Covid hit the chances of them coming up with a plan to face a situation so nuanced even experienced business leaders are unsure what to do are not good.

There needs to be a specific council plan to help retail businesses recover post-vaccine though shops are not holding their breath.