Cities and offices: what path do we take to normality?

For our big cities – the urban environments that incubate so much of our professional learning, personal interactions and national productivity – the path back to some form of normality is fraught with unprecedented complications. Not least of those is the explosion in homeworking brought about by necessity that has starved city centres of white-collar workers, and precipitated a rumbling national discourse on the wider consequences of “distributed work” for so many of our city centres. Naturally, some of those locations are more reliant than others on the ingress of commuters to support and grow their economies. Our analysis estimates the extent to which the daytime population of city council areas expands thanks to office employees commuting inwards; with Cambridge and Manchester the top locations by this particular metric – seeing daytime white-collar population increases of 80% and 72% respectively during “normal” working patterns. These two cities, along with Edinburgh, are also top of the list by share of employment taking place in offices and by local authority share of Gross Value Added coming in industries nominally housed in office premises. Crucially for the City of Edinburgh, however, it relies a lot less on commuter ingress as it retains a much higher percentage of its office workers as residents in comparison with Cambridge and Manchester. The vital missing piece Data from Centre for Cities’ High Streets Recovery Tracker indicates that, unsurprisingly, UK cities are still seeing substantially fewer daytime workers than they are used to – which is likely to cause headaches for civic leadership in trying to plot that route back to normality without such an important piece of the jigsaw. These figures are all the more significant now given they reflect a week within that brief period (between 3 August and 22 September) when workers were being encouraged to return to the office, before the government’s U-turn. Of the 13 cities featured in this publication, only Southampton and Belfast saw even one-fifth of the workforce return to the city during the working week. Edinburgh and Cambridge had 19% of their pre-lockdown daytime workforce populating their respective cities, while Manchester stood level with Birmingham at a lowly 14%. Only Leeds (13%) has seen a shallower volume of returning workers so far. The tracker also looks at overall footfall levels in addition to worker-only numbers, and while some of those do indicate that city centres are getting closer to a level of normality outside of the daytime worker population (partially thanks to Treasury largesse on eating out), they still lag behind the equivalent data for smaller cities and towns. The average drop-off for these 13 cities in terms of overall footfall compared to pre-lockdown levels is 33%, whereas for all the other regional towns and cities in the analysis, it is just 7%. Some of those smaller cities and towns even have a higher number of people populating their streets than they did in February – which could be indicative of white-collar dwellers in, for example, Sunderland, Portsmouth, Birkenhead and Doncaster being happier to stay local for shopping or recreational needs than take all the risks associated with a return to their office building in the adjacent big city. This aspect of trust and safety will be critical for cities to address if they are to get office-based businesses and employees to return in any kind of meaningful way. In this regard, the virus itself remains the chief arbitrator of how quickly these cities will be able to re-mould themselves appropriately with the support of a gradually returning workforce. Indeed, the early September figures for Covid cases per 100,000, seen here in our analysis, already illustrate the North/South divide in how the pandemic is affecting our cities. The challenge of eventually bringing office workers back to the worst affected cities will no doubt be even more acute than elsewhere. To send feedback, e-mail graham.shone@egi.co.uk or tweet @GShoneEG or @estatesgazette This research and much more will appear in the upcoming edition of UK Cities, published 31 October Picture © JP Offord/Shutterstock