Levels at height of lockdown

“While looking after the health and wellbeing of our colleagues has been our main priority, we also recognised the need to look after the people living in the communities around our stores.

“Our people have always been truly passionate about helping local causes, and we hope that these donations will help the food banks keep up with the demand they are experiencing to feed families in the UK and USA.” pre-letting a 694,000 sq ft warehouse at SEGRO’s East Midlands Gateway scheme next to the M1 on the Leicestershire/ Derbyshire border.

According to Property Week, DHL has taken the space as part of a contract for an international food manufacturer.

The lease is on a 20-year lease and is conditional on SEGRO being given panning permission to build the distribution facility.

Bruce Harrison, operational manager at Leicester South Foodbank, said: “Our food bank has never experienced such high levels of demand. Covid-19 has unfortunately caused a lot more people to be struggling financially to make ends meet and put food on the table for their families.

“As a voluntary organisation we rely completely on donations, which are needed more than ever at this time.

The CBRE said average unit sizes are also going up – at 355,000 sq ft in the past three months compared to less than 280,000 sq ft in the second quarter of 2019.

More than 90 per cent of take up was shared equally between the East Midlands, the South East and Yorkshire & the North East.

Online, retail continued to account for the largest proportion of take-up at almost 44 per cent.

“This generous donation from The Watches of Switzerland Group will help us in many ways,” Mr Harrison said.

“This will be from running costs, purchasing stock, funding a new larger warehouse to store enough stock to cope with this increased demand and training even more volunteers and staff.

“Thank you from all of us, this will massively help our community during these hard times.”

Paul Farrow, of CBRE, said: “The logistics sector has gone from strength to strength through some testing times for the wider market and has experienced the highest quarterly take-up figures on record. A large increase in online retail spending has been a key driver, and while warehouse availability is low and continuing to reduce heading into Q3, we expect the appetite for logistics space to continue to grow.”