Shops in tier four towns and cities, which faced a nightmare scenario by being put into lockdown ahead of Christmas, saw footfall nosedive by 72 percent compared with the same period in 2019. In London and other large city centres across the UK, losses were as high as 81.8 percent year-on-year.
The massive loss in sales compounded the earlier losses stores suffered during lockdown in November, traditionally one of the busiest shopping months of the year.
Diane Wehrle, Insights Director at Springboard said: ‘The end of the festive trading period and tightened government restrictions unsurprisingly saw footfall in UK retail destinations drop significantly at the end of 2020.
“Moving into a new year, with the extension of Tier 4 across virtually all of England and lockdowns in place in the devolved nations, retailers are unlikely to see any respite until restrictions are eased in the coming weeks or months.
‘We know from our experience of retail reopening in June 2020 that until the widespread roll out of the vaccine, retail footfall will remain significantly below the pre Covid level.’
Many shops missed out on the Boxing Day sales they’d been counting on to help make up the shortfall and the situation is not likely to improve anytime soon, with the whole country set for tighter lockdown restrictions this week.
Data supplied by retail analyst, Springboard, showed that tier 3 towns also saw footfall drop by as much as 33.9 per cent, whilst tier 2 areas suffered a 18.9 per cent decline.
The imposition of tier four restrictions in some areas led to an overall fall of 72.2 per cent across all retail destinations. The footfall decline was 64.6 per cent in high streets, and 31.9 per cent in retail parks across the UK. Shopping suffered losses of 60 per cent last week and footfall across the UK as a whole was 55.7 per cent lower than in the same week last year.
In each of the three nations, the annual decline in footfall last week was greater than in England, falling by 68 per cent in Scotland, 70.3 per cent in Wales and 78.3 per cent in Northern Ireland – compare to 53.4 per cent in England.
Smaller towns have generally shown more resilience than larger towns and cities, although the situation was still very serious, with an annual decline in footfall of 59.3 percent in coastal towns, 69.6 percent in historic towns and 63.2 percent in market towns.
