Welcome to Liverpool BID Company’s latest Business Insights update. From a footfall perspective, this month has been encouraging: footfall has returned to a positive trend, and weekly data suggest this will continue moving forward. We’ve also drilled deeper into the manner of how particular sectors have driven expenditure: what we’ve seen is that drinking and eating out and supermarket spend was almost exclusively driven by a huge upturn in the number of transactions rather than the value of the average transactions, whereas hotels, retail and clothing were predominantly driven by a large increase in average transaction values with more modest upturns in the number of transactions. Finally, we’ve provided some further insight in the consistent, developing and emerging geo-markets that drove spend; here we saw a consistent drive from London, Bristol, Glasgow and Leicester, an upward trend from Nottingham, Coventry and Newcastle, and emerging markets from South Wales, Edinburgh, Middlesbrough and in a significant way from Northampton.

You can look at the details of the report on this page, or click on the button below to access the PDF version.

Liverpool city centre footfall analysis

Did people visit Liverpool city centre in February 2022?

Footfall increased during the 4 weeks of February by 16.3% relative to the prior 4 weeks of January. Though this upturn in traffic was seen in other places, as has historically been the case during the last 2 years Liverpool’s upturn was higher than other Comparison Towns (+14.6% MoM), the North (+8.2% MoM) and the UK as a whole (+12.4% MoM).

The YoY figure for February was -17.9%, up from -20.3% YoY in January, which suggests that in relative terms the level of traffic in the city is moving in the right direction. This YoY figure is also significantly higher than elsewhere, with other Comparison Towns at -27.5% YoY, the North at -26.7% YoY and the UK as a whole at -25.7% YoY. Against the UK as a whole, then, Liverpool is trending at approximately 7.8 percentage points higher when looking at relative YoY figures.

Looking at specific camera data to see where this recovery is happening, we can see that Church Street and Clayton Square are now only -9.9% and -9.5% YoY, with the Whitechapel cameras actually +2.6% YoY against the 2019 data.

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How did spending patterns change during the pandemic?

Below are three graphs showing the percentage difference increase or decrease in total spend (the blue bar), in average transaction amount (the red line) and in number of transactions (the grey line) between various quarters in L1, L2 and L3 across the key sectors in the economy.

Mid-pandemic vs Pre-Pandemic

Below is the first of these three graphs, firstly showing the increases / decreases seen in Q4 2020 (mid-pandemic) relative to Q1 2020 (pre-pandemic).

We see the following in the data:

In Hotel/Accommodation and Restaurants a large decrease in number of transactions translates to a large decrease in total spend, even though average transaction value increased significantly
A combination of higher average transaction value and higher number of transactions resulted in increases in total spend for Food & Drink and Retail & High St

Xmas 2021 vs Xmas 2020

Below is the second of these three graphs, this time showing the increases / decreases seen in Q4 2021 relative to Q4 2020.

We can see the following in the data:

Food & Drink and Retail & High St saw increases in total spend in correlation with increases in number of transactions but little change in average transaction value
Hotel/Accommodation and Restaurants saw huge increases in total spend in correlation with huge increases in number of transactions, but with little change in average transaction value
Clothing saw an increase in total spend in line with increases in both number and average value of transactions
Supermarkets saw a huge increase in number of transactions but a fall in total spend

Pre-pandemic vs most recent quarter

Below is the third of these three graphs, this time showing the increases / decreases seen in Q4 2021 (most recent quarter) relative to Q1 2020 (pre-pandemic).

We see the following in the data:

Clothing saw a smaller increases in the number of transactions relative to total spend, but a higher increase in the average transaction value, suggesting that this is what drove the increase in spend
Food & Drink, Supermarket and Restaurant total increases in spend appear to be driven largely by the number of transactions, with average transaction values differing only slightly
Hotel/Accommodation and Retail & High St total increases in spend are driven by a combination of increases in number of transactions and value of average transaction

The Geo-markets for spend in Liverpool

With the two maps below, we are looking at ‘calorie’ of spender by post-code area. An average ‘calorie’ visitor of 1 means that the % of total spend in Liverpool that has come from that area is equal to the % of the total visitors that have visited from that area. If this average ‘calorie’ visitor rises to 2, this means that the % of total spend in Liverpool that has come from that area is 2 times the % of visitors that have visited from that area. The higher the average ‘calorie’ of visitor, the more valuable they are to Liverpool’s economy.

Taking only those areas where there was some moderate degree of visitation, this map highlights the post-code areas in the UK that are:

Consistent (YELLOW): in that people have and continue to visit and spend at a high level
Developing (BLUE): in that people have travelled from this area, but are beginning to spend at higher levels

The boxes for the areas have the average ‘calorie’ level of visitors from those areas for Q3 2020 and Q4 2021 to show these geo-markets

Taking only those areas where there was some moderate degree of visitation, this map highlights the post-code areas in the UK that are:

Emerging (GREEN): that is, people from these areas weren’t visiting and spending at a high level in previous quarters, but have now done so for the last two quarters

As such, the boxes for the areas now have the average ‘calorie’ level of visitors from those areas for Q3 2021 and Q4 2021, since they weren’t showing as significant markets previously