London is lagging behind in phone mobility data and sits bottom of the UK town centre ‘recovery index’ because the office workers who usually commute into the city are staying at home – but journeys have bounced back in commuter towns.
Despite Boris Johnson’s plea for office workers to return to work many of the nation’s biggest companies, including RBS, Google and Facebook will allow their employees to work from home for the foreseeable future, meaning city centres are likely to be deserted for some time.
There is enthusiasm for continued home working from significant numbers of both employers and employees, with bosses recognising savings to be made from the reduced need for office space while staff enjoy more time with their families.
A think-tank called the Centre for Cities has produced a nationwide league table of UK town centres based on their current footfall compared to pre-lockdown levels, which shows London at the bottom closely followed by Edinburgh.
But in contrast footfall in traditional commuter towns including and Basildon in Essex, Wigan and Chatham have bounced back as lockdown is eased and residents who would normally commute make journeys around their home towns.
Centre for Cities Director of Policy and Research Paul Swinney said: ‘London’s size and the ability of many of its office-based workers to continue to work from home are likely to be the main reasons why it is having one of the slowest recoveries from lockdown.
‘Having smaller shares of private car owners is likely to be an additional factor given that many people are still reluctant to use public transport to travel into the centre.’
There are still 33% fewer people out walking and 39% fewer public transport passengers in London compared to a January benchmark, while the number of drivers is back to normal, according to Apple.
In contrast, Britain as a whole has seen a 16% spike in car journeys and a small three percent dip in the number of walkers.
London usually attracts 30million visitors every year, so the decline in tourism and commuter travel has hit it particularly hard.
This is illustrated by figures showing footfall on high streets, which showed that before the lockdown nearly half of non-resident visitors had come from outside the capital, compared to just 23% now.
Commuter towns like Basildon attracted far fewer visitors so saw a less dramatic decline in footfall after the lockdown, as many residents stopped travelling to work and stayed at home instead.
Additional research by the think-tank shows the majority of office workers across the country are still unwilling to return, but that they are even less likely to do so if they live in big cities.
In contrast there is substantial enthusiasm for remote working, with one in three office staff saying they intended to stay at home after coronavirus, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).
Pablo Shah, a senior economist at the CEBR, told the Telegraph: ‘This seismic shift, taking place in months rather than decades, will transform the worlds of property, transport, retail, leisure and, not least, fashion. Ten years ago, this would not have been possible.’
The research further indicated that between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of employees will be working from home on any one day in 2021.
This graph shows the number of people in high streets compared to the pre-lockdown benchmark of 100. This shows that the number of visitors to town centres in Basildon is rising faster than in London. Basildon is also recovering faster than the UK average, although the difference appears very subtle from the graph
These graphs – based on Apple data – show the rise or fall in the number of people driving, walking or using public transport compared to a benchmark from January. London has generally recovered slower than most other major cities, although the number of road journeys is back to normal
The 10 biggest cities in the UK have seen just 14 per cent of its staff return to work whereas cities such as Gloucester has seen 30 per cent of its workers come back – because they are more likely to drive to the office.
Only one in eight workers in London has returned to the office in July, compared to nearly 50 per cent in Basildon.
In the City, only 800 of Goldman Sachs’s 6,000 London staff have returned, while fewer than 2,000 of the 12,000 at JP Morgan are back.
The drop in figures pose a significant concern for city-centre businesses such as cafes, pubs and restaurants which saw the majority of their customers are local workers.
Companies across the country are constrained by a lack of space and can only bring a fraction of their headcount back into the office if they are to keep social distancing between workers.
The knock-on effect is that cafes, pubs and shops that rely on office staff footfall are worried they will be driven out of business.
Paul Swinney, Director of Policy and Research at the Centre for Cities, told MailOnline: ‘Low city centre footfall is very damaging to the hospitality and service sectors that depend on custom from office workers. Shops, restaurants and pubs are unlikely to see a return to normal levels of custom until people return to their offices.’
Official figures showed GDP grew by 1.8 per cent in May, although it is still nearly a quarter lower than before the draconian coronavirus restrictions were imposed. In this chart 100 represents the size of the economy in 2016
