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image captionThe Scottish Retail Consortium is calling for a new strategy to help firms.
Scottish retail lost 13,000 jobs and £3.5bn in annual turnover before the start of Covid restrictions, according to a trade body.
The Scottish Retail Consortium (SRC) has called for a national strategy to support firms.
It said that the outlook for retailers had become worse during the pandemic as more shoppers were buying online.
The findings are part of the SRC s new manifesto.
SRC director David Lonsdale said: Retail was already in a difficult position before 2020. Covid has accelerated the existing trends, including driving customers towards digital, weakened demand, and put retailers under unparalleled pressure.
IT is very difficult to have a conversation with friends and family, to watch the news, or to listen to daily coronavirus updates without a growing sense of dread. The overwhelming feeling seems to be one of our respective governments reacting to events and making up their plans on the hoof which in turn lowers the confidence of the public in finding a way out of this car crash of a situation. Not once have I heard someone in authority saying we have already planned for this . Before I retired having spent a number of years working in the private sector as well as more than 10 years in the Civil Service, I would regularly participate in workshops where heads of discipline were brought together, presented with a disaster scenario – national power outage, catastrophic telecommunications failure and more – and asked to work through the steps needed to be taken in order for the business/department to be able to continue to trade. The output from these workshops was vetted by
In another week where the business news flow – as in nearly every other aspect of life – was driven primarily by the pandemic and its financial wrath, in came the Scottish budget with some sticky plasters and Blu Tack to keep what remains of the economy limping along to an unspecified dawn of recovery. It’s not that the measures announced by Finance Minister Kate Forbes on Thursday weren’t welcome. The number one ask from every corner of the business community was for an extension of the relief on business rates – the equivalent of Council Tax on a domestic property – to help firms weather the coronavirus storm. On this she delivered, but only for an extra three months.
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