Nottingham's empty shops: Behind the headlines

One-third of Nottingham’s shops standing empty? Doesn’t sound plausible, does it?
But that’s what the Local Data Company is telling the rest of the UK today.
Its national retail vacancy report sends out an apparently troubling message about one of the city’s key industries. But the consensus among people I spoke to yesterday is that LDC’s number just doesn’t ring true.
One city property agency (FHP) says the vacancy rate in the retail core – excluding tertiary locations – is less than 14 per cent. The City Council says it is 17 per cent. But that’s still 12 per cent shy of LDC’s eye-popping 29.6 per cent.
And LDC recorded a vacancy rate of nearly 30 per cent only six months after another consultancy, CACI, said Nottingham was still the fifth biggest retail destination outside London (by spend) even without the redevelopment of its shopping centres.
Hero to zero in the space of six months? Sorry, I don’t buy it.
So what’s underneath all this? As I’ve blogged before, LDC’s methodology is bound to produce a higher vacancy rate than other surveys simply because it counts more shops. Whether it’s right to do so is a moot point: while most of us view the city centre as being bounded by the two shopping centres north and south and the Castle and the Contemporary east and west, LDC goes much further, counting shop units as far afield as Canning Circus and Sneinton.
It does this because it has chosen to employ across the country geographical definitions of city centres provided by a single, supposedly authoritative source – the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government. So it can say it’s applied a uniform standard everywhere.
Yet it may still be wrong.
With the best will in the world, the likes of Canning Circus were never part of Nottingham city centre and ceased to be thriving retail zones many years ago. So you can argue that the map which defines this survey is, quite simply, out of date.
LDC also walked around the ‘city centre’ back in November – just at the point when Westfield had cleared out many of the units in Broadmarsh prior to its aborted redevelopment. So while they were definitely empty, it wasn’t for reasons related to the health of Nottingham as a retail destination.
So there is just cause to question LDC’s number - and, more importantly, the impression it is almost certain to create. Believe me, some sections of the media will be saying that Nottingham’s allegedly poor performance is yet more evidence of recession/retail woes/cash-strapped consumers/the impact of online shopping etc [delete according to agenda].
There may be a degree of truth in those analyses, but none is an accurate picture of what is happening here. LDC should have qualified its numbers.
Commercially, FHP’s survey – while not independent - is much sharper. Like most agents, it knows when shops are ‘between lets’ (empty, but a new tenant has already signed a lease) so doesn’t count them. It also knows which parts of the city are performing assets and which need a new lease of life.
This, surely, is the real issue underneath not just LDC’s survey but the failures of some retailers, the vacancy rates in secondary and tertiary locations and the growth of online retailing, be it by laptop, tablet or smartphone.
On that basis, LDC director Matthew Hopkinson is on more solid ground when he suggests Nottingham’s planners should not dismiss the bigger picture in its survey.
He told me yesterday: “Retail destinations should not deny reality or stick their heads in the sand. If all you do is what you are already doing you will keep the problems you already have because the world is changing.
“Large cities and smaller towns need to shrink their retail core to reflect the fact that demand is moving away from high streets. We need to bring people back into city centres, both by encouraging them to live there and by holding events which bring them in.”
Nottingham is probably entitled to take a well-informed swipe at the headline figure LDC has published (though it needs to do that nationally rather than locally; few here are likely to take the number too seriously).
But social, economic and technological change will not go away. If Nottingham wants to demonstrate that it remains in the vanguard of leading retail destinations then the most powerful statement it can make will be in visionary planning policies.