A reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world: Part three: Benchmarking While many indicators of town centre performance are biased towards retail metrics, there is still much useful data available with which to track performance.
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A reflection on the prospect for UK high streets and town centres to find a new future in a post COVID-19 world: Part two: Public sector intervention? Perhaps given this surfeit of earnest and well-intentioned scrutiny, there is a dawning realisation of the limitations of what intervention and planning can […]
These three blog posts form part of a series of articles by R3intelligence academics and researchers in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, at Northumbria University, about analysing town and city centre retail markets using GIS and big data.
R3intelligence’s business rates data model has the GIS mapping capacity to represent changes (2010 to 2017) in rateable values and stock for all business premises in England and Wales . The data model is capable of fine-grained analysis down to postcode level, revealing detailed patterns of change or stability at […]
In a recent article for The Conversation, we highlighted the massive decline in retail in the UK in between 2010 and 2017. In most local authority areas outside London, not only has the total amount of retail floorspace shrunk by, on average, 27.6%, but the rateable value (RV) of properties […]
Our research on changes in business rates and retail stock in England and Wales was picked up by several media outlets this week. First published in The Conversation, our striking maps sparked debates on taxation methods, retail trends and vacancy rates. Anyone can join in via our Twitter account or by […]
The tax that small business owners pay on their premises has offered a useful lesson in how the ripples of a financial crisis can leave us floundering years later. It also laid bare a stark divide between north and south in the UK, and sent the ruling Conservative Party rushing […]
The Chancellor’s announcement on the 5th of October at the Conservative Party Conference in relation to business rate devolution took many by surprise and has since received considerable attention in the press over the last few weeks. This was then followed by John Swinney announcing at the SNP conference that […]
Increasingly, local authorities are being asked to stand on their own two feet and fund welfare provision, economic development and urban regeneration themselves. Mirroring developments in Western Europe and North America, urban policy is increasingly fragmented, dispersed and financialised. The opportunity for new financial powers and fiscal decentralisation has been […]