White Van Man’s doing his bit. Now Britain needs White Collar workers back in the office

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THE British economy is functioning like a wasting muscle – vastly underused and at risk of permanent damage. It has been in a state of atrophy since l ockdown was imposed in late March, and the longer it is allowed to continue in such a state, the harder it will be to coax it back to anything like normal.

The figures make for horrific reading. Just last week, Government debt rose above £2 trillion for the first time ever. Spending on measures such as the jobs furlough scheme means that this staggering level of debt now equals the value of everything the UK produces in a single year.

And at the heart of this growing catastrophe is retail and the high street. Today, five months since lockdown, shops are open but they are not operating anywhere near like normal. Over the past few months, during my store visits to every corner of the country, it has become plainly clear just how empty our high streets are.

And, as I understand it, with the declining number of shoppers and squeezed margins, supermarkets are tooling up for the mother of all price wars from September in a desperate effort to keep hold of customers – putting yet more family businesses in peril.

Last month, footfall was down by 47.2 per cent on the high street and by as much as 42 per cent in shopping centres and 19.9 per cent in retail parks. The number of visitors to Central London remained 69 per cent lower than in 2019.

A tide of redundancies has already started, with some of the biggest names in Britain caught up. Marks and Spencer has announced it is cutting 7,000 staff, with 4,000 being slashed at Boots. This is merely the tip of the iceberg – the true scale will not be apparent until the furlough scheme ends. Millions could be unemployed overnight.

You might say this is the ‘new normal’ and that we should simply adjust. After all, Iceland, t he supermarket chain my parents founded, has done well during lockdown and has grown its market share. Why should I be so concerned? The answer is that retail and the high street are at the very heart of our community as well as our economy. If town centres suffer, then Iceland suffers and our customers as well.

There is too much at stake for us to simply accept the death of our high streets and the historic towns that help give this country its identity. It is not a done deal. Local shops not only bring a sense of community to millions, they are in many cases a vital resource. Not everyone has been in a position to order food from Ocado while spending lockdown in second homes in Cornwall or the Cotswolds.

It is the most vulnerable people in our society – the elderly, disabled, and those with low incomes and large families – who are the most dependent on bricks-and-mortar shops and the human contact that goes with them.

So what’s to be done? How do we get people out of their homes and back to work – to factories, offices, high streets and shops?

The first thing we need from the Government is leadership and clarity, including a publicity campaign persuading workers to return. We must all play our part.

It is heartening that commercial traffic has returned in the past week to something like normal. But if White Van Man can do his bit, why can’t White Collar Man and Woman do the same?

Teachers hold an especially important role. Not only do they educate our young and shape minds, but they give parents the freedom to return to their workplaces.

Since the crisis began in March, millions of essential workers – from brilliant shop workers, like my employees, to NHS staff, to the tradesmen on our roads – have kept our country going.

Yet during this time, office workers have remained comfortably at home. Perhaps too comfortably. Of

There’s too much at stake to just accept the death of our high streets Our new national slogan could become Shop Out To Help Out

course it can have many attractions, and my own business has functioned very effectively with just a skeleton staff manning our head office and the rest of our central teams working remotely.

But face- to- face contact drives engagement and sparks fresh thinking. It can’t be matched through Zoom calls. So we are now encouraging our colleagues to come into the office more frequently, while taking all necessary steps to ensure their safety.

Everyone needs to look at the balance between office and home working to ensure we have both business efficiency and personal happiness. I agree there is a happy medium to be struck, but simply staying at home full time will gravely harm our economy and our society.

If we all abandon the habit of travelling to work, then the whole supporting infrastructure of trains, buses, taxis, restaurants, sandwich bars and convenience stores is doomed, along with the jobs they provide.

There are wider things the Government can and must do. The outdated system of business rates has already been effectively suspended.

Now, surely, is the time to abolish it completely and replace it with an online sales tax that will level the playing field between traditional high street retailers and offshore online mega-corporations with advanced degrees in tax avoidance. (I write this, incidentally, as a retailer with a substantial online presence of my own.)

For non-food retailers, a prolonged reduction of VAT would also be extremely helpful.

We should also take a hard look at the outdated rules and regulations that restrict when shops can open and what they do, rules that make it so much harder to compete with online trading.

And landlords need to be realistic about the rents that shop owners can actually afford.

The Government’ s proposed changes to planning laws are a big step in the right direction. Redundant shops can also be viewed as latent housing stock, providing affordable homes where young people actually want to live and work. This would be a far better option than tearing up the green belt with housing estates that necessitate the use of cars.

Repurposing buildings – as opposed to knocking them down for replacement – needs to become the norm.

Covid-19 is, of course, a danger, but one that we need to keep in perspective. The Office for National Statistics estimates that about 28,000 people in England have it, or 0.0005 per cent of the population. Seven times more people are currently dying of the flu.

Make no mistake, jobs, families and entire communities depend on how and where you choose to spend your money today.

If a steelworks or aerospace factory closes, it is front page news. Yet thousands of retail job losses are already being announced every day right now, and it has scarcely created a ripple.

So the next time you’re distracted from working at your laptop at home by the thought of ordering something from Amazon, maybe pause and think how empty life will seem if there is no longer a functioning town centre where you can go out to meet friends, browse, eat, drink and chat.

Then consider getting back into the office at least some of the time, using the public transport network that will cease to exist without you, and supporting the local coffee bar or bakery.

It’s down to all of us to shape the sort of society we want to live in, and all our actions count. Maybe ‘shop out to help out’ could become our next national slogan?