Lambeth Council started working with the Local Data Company in 2020 as part of its focus on an intelligence-based approach to place management as part of their emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This involved utilising Local Data Company’s dynamic retail data to prioritise funding, measure success of projects and benchmark Lambeth and its town centres against similar-sized areas across London and the UK.
Lambeth is one of the largest London boroughs, with several diverse and distinct centres. Through a detailed analysis of the unique retail and leisure mix of each centre and what makes it attractive to the local catchment, an understanding of the profile and personality can be determined, which in turn, is used by the borough to create bespoke strategic plans, suited to the strengths and weaknesses of each location.
Local Data Company is the only business to hold over 10 years of insight on over 3,000 GB locations, which allows Lambeth to review both long-term and short-term trends.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit central London in early 2020, the Council had to pivot resources to focus on protecting Lambeth residents and stopping the spread of the virus. Lambeth used LDC insight alongside Public Health data to identify and allocate resources to areas that were more likely to get busy, where the risk of passing covid infection was higher.
Data on store locations and categories was used to ensure that shops within Lambeth were complying with Covid guidelines set out by Central Government. Information used included store names and ownership, occupier category and status as ‘essential’ or ‘non-essential’, providing Lambeth with a list of stores to check for closures and compliance with social distancing protocols. Data was also used to identify which stores were most at risk of failure, such as those that rely on the night-time economy, so that the Council could target additional support.
Since the end of the first UK lockdown in June 2020, Local Data Company has been tracking reopening trends for temporarily closed businesses across Lambeth and GB, which provides detailed insight into how quickly businesses are bouncing back and whether certain categories of occupiers may need additional support to do so.
Lambeth’s flexible intelligence-led approach enabled the team to find a range of uses and applications for retail location data in driving the council’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The data LDC are providing through their Online Insights Platform and quarterly scorecards is giving us valuable insights into the composition of our high streets and town centres across Lambeth. We can explore the mix of uses, vacancies and other key characteristics and trends in much finer grain detail than we have been able to using other datasets. The Covid-19 impact analysis will be particularly useful moving forward as we monitor trends in business activity to inform our high street recovery interventions. The LDC team are great to work with and have provided a lot of upfront support to ensure our locations of focus and scorecard categories are set up provide us the most useable analysis and insights possible.”
- Laura Davy, Head of High Streets at Lambeth Council
To find out more about how Local Data Online can support your objectives, visit our information page or email the team at team@localdatacompany.com.