At our 5th Scottish Retail and Leisure Trends Summit in partnership with the University of Stirling we interviewed our panel of experts who shared with us their opinions on the current and future state of retail in Scotland, as well as sharing valuable insights on what challenges they foresaw for the Scottish market.

On November 28th, was the Local Data Company’s (LDC) fifth Scottish Retail and Leisure Trends Summit held in partnership with the University of Stirling. The report revealed interesting insights as to how Scottish centres are performing relative to England and Wales but also relative to each other. There was also a short presentation by Chris Fowler of LDC on how data is being captured and used at a local level to understand performance and opportunity with a case study from Aberdeenshire Council on the town of Peterhead.

The latest report by the Institute for Retail Studies - University of Stirling and LDC looks at the latest retail health and trends across Scotland's towns and cities. The report is presented in three sections focusing in turn on retail premises, retail vacancy and retail structure (and associated leisure sector).

It is something which many retailers would find it hard to face up to.

“We just have too many shops,” property consultant Graham Seaton told delegates at the 5th LDC Scottish Retail and Leisure Trends summit. And it seems he is right. The LDC report showed, for the first time in five years, a slight increase in vacancy rates on high streets in Scottish towns, while units previously occupied by Booze, Money and Gambling (BMG) firms, are being vacated at a rate of knots.

On Tuesday 28th November we will be holding our annual Scottish Retail and Leisure Trends Summit running in partnership with the University of Stirling and kindly hosted by KPMG LLP in Glasgow, Scotland.

Retail is a very important sector to the wider Scottish economy – there are more than 20,000 businesses, 250,000 jobs and it’s a £7bn market. 

For the last four years, mid December has seen the release of the latest edition of the LDC/University of Stirling Retail report on the situation of retailing in the major towns and cities across Scotland. Last Tuesday saw the fourth edition formally launched at a breakfast event at KPMG in Edinburgh, with coverage across various media – though with various slants, ranging from wanting to see the news as positive to wanting to turn it into the negative.

In a year full of political and economic uncertainty for all businesses - not least retailers - it was somewhat reassuring to see Scotland’s shop vacancy rate continuing to move in the right direction.

On December 13, LDC with the University of Stirling held its 4th Scottish Retail and Leisure Summit. During the event, the latest findings on the retail health and emerging trends across Scotland were presented.

John Beattie from BBC Radio Scotland interviewed Prof. Leigh Sparks and Matthew Hopkinson after the event, to understand the retail and leisure mix across Scottish cities and towns. The following points were discussed:

The latest report by the Institute for Retail Studies - University of Stirling and LDC looks at the latest retail health and trends across Scotland's towns and cities. The report is presented in three sections focusing in turn on retail premises (and associated leisure sector), retail vacancy and retail structure.

One of the main takeaways is the shift from retail to leisure that Scottish cities and towns are experiencing.

Matthew Hopkinson, Director at LDC, comments: "Overall, the data shows that Scotland is making good progress in responding to the challenges of modern place management and this can only be done, as Professor Leigh Sparks makes clear in the report, through good data and sound analysis on an ongoing basis."