According to the British Retail Consortium (BRC), 6,000 physical retail businesses have closed in the UK during the past five years, with the North and the Midlands being the hardest afflicted regions.
The company highlighted “crippling business rates and the impact of the Covid lockdowns as the key part of decisions to close stores and think twice about new openings”.
The newest BRC numbers reveal that the rate of closures isn’t slowing down as the cost-of-living crisis persists, with UK retail vacancy rates rising to 13.9% in the second quarter of 2023. The rate increased by 0.1% from the first quarter but just little from a year earlier.
Shopping centre vacancy rates stayed constant at 17.8%, the same level as Q1, while high street vacancy rates increased to 13.9% in Q2, 0.1% worse than Q1.
Although vacancy rates in the industry actually decreased 8.1% in Q2 and marked an improvement of 0.6 percentage points from Q1, retail parks still demonstrate their attractiveness. According to the BRC, this retail space continues to have by far the lowest vacancy rate.
According to the report, retail parks’ resilience has been enhanced “by their strong occupancy fundamentals and relatively small lot sizes”.
