Why is Edinburgh Council delaying campaign to help business? – John McLellan

Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG) is planning a campaign to generate trade, but it has been delayed by the city council despite the urgent need for action, writes John McLellan.

Holidaymakers queue at Edinburgh Bus Station at the start of Trades Fortnight in 1959

It doesn’t feel like it, but tomorrow is the start of the Trades, a day when the pubs would usually be full as people knocked off from work to kick off the traditional Edinburgh summer holiday fortnight.

Instead, as we all know, no-one is going anywhere. The pubs and restaurants won’t open for another two weeks – as luck would have it, just in time for the Glasgow Fair – and the most activity for months at Edinburgh Airport has been this week’s training flights by an RAF transporter.

Cycling along George Street and Princes Street in last week’s depressing, grey, hazy drizzle felt like the end of days; the shops and bars shuttered as they had been for the previous 13 weeks, hardly a soul about and the quiet broken only by the occasional bus and the odd hungry seagull. With the reopening of some shops on Monday and slightly brighter weather, surely this week was bound to be better, given the pictures of people queuing outside Primark on Monday morning? On the same route this week there were indeed more people about, but only a few.

For streets which would normally be bustling with locals and visitors, the only notable concentration of people was a handful of masked-up tourists from the Far East on St Andrew Square and a group of mums and buggies across from them at the entrance to Multrees Walk. If they were waiting for Harvey Nicks to reopen they would have a long wait.

Resolutely, the chap on the corner of South St Andrew Street who accompanies tinny tunes on his saxophone was still busking away to an audience made up largely of pigeons. Welcome to Festival City, 2020. The same day, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane was predicting that economic recovery will be fast and in fact that the signs were already there of increasing consumer spending going back to the middle of May, particularly so-called “delayable” purchases like household goods and DIY products. Mr Haldane cited official retail sales data showing spending in May was 12 per cent up because of the number of shops able to re-open and increased online sales. Even so, spending was still 13 per cent behind pre-Covid levels, he said.

These are May figures, and here we are in July with Edinburgh’s main shopping streets still virtually lifeless as money continues to be funnelled towards online giants like Amazon, with goods bought online now a third of all purchases compared to a fifth before the crisis.

When the pubs and restaurants can open, it will only be four weeks before the schools go back so the opportunity for Edinburgh businesses to generate some income from local trade to get them through the winter is small, to say the least.

Against this background, whatever happens to the wider UK economy, for Edinburgh city centre businesses the recovery will not be V-shaped and for some of them, like the Michelin-starred Castle Terrace restaurant which announced this week it will not re-open after lockdown, there will be no recovery at all.

In the absence of an effective marketing organisation, the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG) is planning a campaign to generate trade, the first phase of which is to encourage local people to explore their own city, but that was delayed by the city’s SNP-Labour administration for reasons which were hard to understand.

With time fast running out, there will now be another hearing when the charity’s plan can be more fully explored. But with or without the City Council’s blessing some sort of effort is going to be needed before more companies suffer the same fate as Castle Terrace.

With six weeks to go before the English schools return, there should be hope that visitors from the South could be enticed northwards, but with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon refusing to rule out cross-border quarantine restrictions, the chances of English families taking a punt on a Scottish holiday are slim when they have Spain, Greece and the rest of England from which to choose.

While ETAG isn’t giving up, Edinburgh’s summer season is a write-off and it remains a question of survival, so let’s hope next year’s Trades still has some left.

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