Why councils should offer free parking in the run-up to Christmas - Andrew Vine

There is a tough winter ahead for our town and city centres as they are battered by the cost of living crisis and rising costs.

Just how tough is apparent from the difficulties over the past week at two chains very familiar to Yorkshire shoppers – clothing retailer Joules, which has filed for administration, and homewares store Wilko, which is seeking a £30m cash injection.

Other household names will be struggling by spring next year unless more of us turn our backs on the likes of Amazon and spend what we’re able to afford on the shopping streets which are the beating heart of so many communities.

Closed shops disfigure virtually every one of them in Yorkshire, whether in cities or market towns, and behind the boarded-up or whitewashed windows are stories of hard-working owners who simply couldn’t make the sums add up and staff losing their jobs.

Loss of trade caused by Covid lockdowns, allied to the online onslaught, were damaging enough, but now the recession threatens even more livelihoods.

An independent off-licence close to where I live has just added to the tally of shops and jobs lost, with the owner calling it a day after 20 years and regretfully telling his two staff they are out of work.

People ordering cases of wine and beer online at prices he can’t match have done for his business, and there will be many more stories like it in Yorkshire, each of them chipping away at the fabric of communities by leaving another vacant store on a parade of shops.

The Office for National Statistics warned at the end of last week that retailers face a difficult Christmas as the soaring cost of living hits households. Spending in shops is 2.4 per cent down since August and remains well below pre-pandemic levels.

The problems were underlined by M&S saying retailers faced a “gathering storm”.

Shopping locally – and where possible favouring independent retailers without corporate resources to fall back on – is one way that all of us as consumers can help in heading off that storm, or at least making it less damaging.

The Government is not doing anything like enough to help. In his budget last week, the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, gave with one hand and took away with the other by announcing business rates relief – and then that a proposed online sales tax had been scrapped.

By scrapping it, he failed to address the central unfairness that has driven so many shops out of business – bricks-and-mortar retailers face proportionately much higher costs than online sellers’ out-of-town distribution centres that have far fewer staff and lower overheads.

Only days before the ONS spelled out how difficult a Christmas retailers face, the man who personifies the threat to them, Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, made a tone-deaf statement about his philanthropy, smilingly declaring that he was finding it hard to give money away.

This from the world’s second-richest man, whose fortune is estimated at $110bn, which has effectively been founded on putting shops out of business by tempting their customers online.

If I hadn’t already decided to boycott his empire this Christmas, the sheer smugness of the man lauding his own riches would have made me do it.

The next month is going to be make or break for many retailers. A good Christmas will give them a fighting chance of weathering the worst of the recession and they deserve our support.

One measure that could give Yorkshire’s shopping streets a boost over the next month would be if councils offered free parking on a couple of Saturdays in the run-up to Christmas.

Granted, local authorities are under severe financial pressure and need every penny they can earn from their car parks, but even so, keeping shops in business – and their staff in work – is in everybody’s interest and surely worth the loss of a couple of days’ takings.

Town and city centres are doing their best to be as attractive as possible, with events and entertainment to bring shoppers in, as well as late-night openings. If customers could also park for nothing, that might make a crucial difference.

It would be desperately sad – and make a bad economic environment even worse – if we go into January witnessing a new spate of shop closures.