Welcome to Liverpool BID Company’s latest Business Insights Update. Having received a wealth of new data around expenditure from our partners at Movement Strategies, this month we’ve focused on some of the key trends we’ve seen in spend in Liverpool City Centre. Noticeably, spend in Quarter 4 of 2021 showed that it was approaching the levels seen in Quarter 4 of 2019, pre-Covid; this development of spend has predominantly been driven by the hospitality sector prior to the Christmas period, after which Retail’s prominence was elevated; also key in this up-turn over the last two quarters was the spend coming into the city from tourists, though, again, during the Christmas period, this spend was matched by Residents. You can read a summary of what we found on this page, or access a PDF of the report by clicking the black button immediately below.

Liverpool city centre footfall analysis

Did people visit Liverpool city centre in January 2022?

Footfall in January 2022 dropped by 15.3% relative to the same period in December 2021. There is nothing unusual in this dip following the Christmas period however: MoM traffic in January relative to December, even pre-pandemic, was frequently between -15% and -20%.

In spite of this drop-off month-to-month, YoY traffic stayed fairly constant with where it was at in December, up 0.5 percentage points to -20.3%. Given that November 2021’s YoY figure (when compared to the equivalent period in 2019) was only -11.7%, this suggests that the effects of the prevalence of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 were seen in December 2021 and did not significantly worsen in January 2022. It’s also encouraging to see that Liverpool’s resilience to such changes are consistently displayed when comparing these data points to the North, other Comparison Towns and the UK as a whole, all of which had significantly worse YoY figures this month.

The recent upturn in WoW traffic also suggests that footfall is trending toward a recovery of sorts in February and onward.Find out more

Liverpool city centre spend analysis

Topline Spend data across the quarters

The below graph shows the spend in Liverpool city centre (L1, L2 and L3) on card (split by VISA and NON-VISA) across various quarters over the last two years.

Relative to Q4 of 2021, Q4 of 2019 and Q1 of 2020 have been included to provided pre-pandemic benchmarks, Q3 of 2021 gives an indication of how spend has changed since the summer, and Q4 of 2020 shows the change in spend since the last Christmas period.

The following trends can be seen:

Spend in Q4 2021 was approaching the level seen pre-pandemic in Q4 2019

Spend in Q4 of 2021 was almost £200m higher than Q4 of 2020 (up from £425m to £623m)

Spend in Q4 2021 increased on Q3 2021 by almost £90m

Spend in Q4 2021 is the highest since the start of the pandemic, topping Q3 2021, which was the previous highest quarter

Sector Spend in L1, L2 and L3

The below graph shows the VISA spend in the top spending sectors across the various quarters. As with the top-line spend, Q1 2020 has been included for a pre-pandemic comparison, Q4 2020 has been included to compare with the last Xmas period, and Q3 2021 has been included to see the development in spend from quarter to quarter.

Notable trends are:

The ‘Restaurant’ sector (which includes pubs and bars) is a significant driver in overall increases, up £51m and £65m in Q4 2021 than Q1 2020 and Q4 2020 respectively

‘Clothing’ and ‘Retail & High St’ are the main sectors driving the increase in spend in Q4 2021 relative to Q3 2021

Spend by time of day in L1, L2 and L3

The below graph shows the proportion of VISA spend in L1, L2 and L3 by time of day across various quarters. As with the last two pages, Q1 2020 has been included for a pre-pandemic comparison, Q4 2020 has been included to compare with the last Xmas period, and Q3 2021 has been included to see the development in spend from quarter to quarter.

The main trend seen here is the shift toward ‘Evening’ and ‘Night’ spend when restrictions aren’t in place.

Though Q4 2020 had a higher total spend than Q1 2020 (by £21m), most of this spend was happening in the ‘Lunch’ and ‘Afternoon’ periods. After restrictions were eased in Q3 2021, the proportion of spend in the ‘Evening’ and ‘Night’ rocketed again.

This trend supports what we saw in the Sector spend, and about how ‘Restaurant’ spend heavily drives the economy when no restrictions are in place.

Spend by catchment distance in L1, L2 and L3

There are two significant conclusions we can draw from this data:

When spend was higher overall – in Q3 2021 and Q4 2021 – more spend was driven by those travelling from farther afield (>50km), with slightly less reliance on those travelling from within the city region (0-10km and 11-20km)
More spend comes from within the Liverpool City region during the Christmas periods, with spend 3% more spend in Q4 2021 coming from residents than Q3 2021, and 8% more spend coming from residents in Q4 2020 than Q1 2020

Where are the high spenders coming from?

The above table shows the visit rate and spend rate of visitors to Liverpool. It shows the ten locations with the most ‘calorific’ visitors: that is, the visitors who contribute the most spend to Liverpool’s economy relative to the number of visitors.

To take London as an example – the ‘% Spend / % Visitation’ rate (highlighted in the red box) shows us that even though London contributed 1.2% of visitors to Liverpool in Q4 2021 these visitors contributed over 3% of spend. As such their spend was 2.3 times higher than the rate at which they are visiting.

This information is extremely valuable in understanding not just where people are coming from (the chart is filtered to only those places from where more than a 1000 people visited), but also whether these visitors are spending money.

We may expect some of the locations on the list to be there: London, Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol are similar to Liverpool as Comparison towns, with a similar product on offer.

Less expected may be the value of those travelling from Coventry, Nottingham and Leicester. All are locations in the East Midlands and may provide us with an insight of where to target our marketing to attract visitors to the city in the future.