CORRECTIONS & COMPLAINTS

Ditch the waffle & finally act High street jobs ‘carnage’

JOBS on the high street have plunged by almost 300,000 since 2011, hitting women hardest, a report shows.

The number of retail cashiers and check-out operators fell by 75,500, or 32%, due to the combined effects of austerity and online shopping.

There are now also 64,000 fewer sales and retail assistants, and 64,600 fewer bank and post office clerks.

While around 80% of the 289,000

WHEN it comes to the crisis gripping our high streets, the Government has shamefully fiddled while Rome burns.

Every day this year, as ministers talked tough but did next to nothing, around 400 shop staff lost their jobs.

Brexit has made matters worse, by distracting policymakers’ attention.

Yet, even now, the Government shows it’s happier to kick the can down the road than unleash the drastic help needed. Its previously trumpeted business rate cut for small axed high street jobs were held by women, 90% of the 100,000 new van drivers that have been hired to deliver internet orders are men.

Alan Lockey, head of the RSA Future Work Centre which produced the study, said: “The carnage on the high street has hollowed out many jobs traditionally held by women.

“This is having a profound effect on individuals, families and society.” shops is a ruse, as thousands of them don’t pay the tax anyway, while it won’t save most chain stores a penny.

Task forces to help town centres can be good, in time, if they work.

But it’s like spitting in the wind if the public are driven away by costly parking, ticket machines that don’t work and a dire bus service. All the while, online rivals snatch sales while failing to pay their fair share of tax. Yet again, ministers’ talk of blitzing corporate tax avoiders is just hot air.

Any help is welcome and is what the Mirror has been campaigning for.

Now is the time to ditch the waffle, the soundbites, the empty promises.

For every day the Government refuses to dispense the emergency – and, yes, costly – help our town centres need is one when countless lives and livelihoods are ruined.