Daniel Ionescu

The Brexit lull, with the UK’s departure postponed to October, has given the East Midlands housing market a boost. However that took its toll on businesses hit by weak profits. Confidence among industry bosses is low.

The May 2019 Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) survey shows the number of new properties being listed for sale improved last month, while interest from would-be buyers saw a rise in the number of people looking to buy a home. The increases however are marginal, as the market has been relatively flat for the best part of the year.

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Despite the slight influx in interest from buyers and sellers, newly agreed sales continue to slip, leaving respondents cautious over sales activity for the three months ahead. Once again, the cautious outlook is set to be short-lived and Brexit related, as respondents still expect sales activity to increase in the coming twelve months. Agents do however, remain more optimistic for the year ahead as +36% expect prices to rise in the coming twelve months, up from +24% in April.

Meanwhile, business confidence in the East Midlands is low and has been hit by weak profits growth and Brexit concerns, according to a new study from Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Slowing global trade is likely to be adversely impacting the East Midland’s relatively large manufacturing sector, while the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the Brexit process may also be dampening sentiment.

Businesses in our region, particularly manufacturers, still look to be taking precautionary Brexit measures such as stockpiling, with the proportion of companies reporting above normal stock levels higher than the national average. Confidence may also be suffering from weaker profits growth, which fell from 2.5% in Q2 2018 to just 1.7% in Q2 2019, the weakest rate across all of the UK. With sluggish market conditions apparent, a fifth of businesses in the East Midlands now report late payments as a growing issue.

Dr Sophie Dale-Black, ICAEW East Midlands Director, said: “Businesses in the East Midlands say that they don’t feel that things will change much in the next few months and this is reflected in their low confidence. Companies in the region are facing lots of challenges, with manufacturers especially facing problems. Business owners have told us that they need clarity and want politicians to start making decisions to help them plan their operations for what is at the moment an uncertain future.”

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For a few hours at least, Louth became the ‘Pie Capital of the World’ during its first-ever Louth Pie Day on April 3. A one-day festival of pies led by eight butchers, bakers and cafés in the small market town created a business boost and a new awareness through the event celebrating the quality of small businesses. This highly social initiative was conceived and organised by pie lover Kiat Huang, who adopted Louth as his home town two years ago. He believes it’s a repeatable model that could be followed by other small market towns.

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Eight of the town’s artisan pie makers – butchers, bakers and cafes – reported they sold three normal weeks’ worth of pies during the one-day festival. They sold the advance tickets and promoted the event, aided by a small ‘Pie Team’ of volunteers. There have already been calls to make it an annual event.

Pie enthusiasts could buy an advance £5 ticket (£6 on the day) to get a pie box containing five pie slices vouchers and a map of the trail. On the day, shops and cafes offered pie slices and served special pie menus from their own premises.  “The event was designed so that all the shops collected all the revenue themselves, then shared it between themselves 100% fairly, based on how many pie slices they each provided customers on the day,” Kiat explained.

Overall there were 1,551 advance pie boxes sold and 624 on the day. Shops had queues stretching out of pie shops and along the streets at peak times, and many of the traders enjoyed the busiest Wednesday market day for a long time. The town’s festive menu included sweet and savoury traditional pies, heritage pies, vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free pies and pasties. More than 2,100 slices of pie were served hot and cold, to take away, and at cafe tables throughout the town.

“Louth already has an excellent reputation for high-quality and independent food shops, and it’s an idea that can be emulated by other small towns with their own speciality, or something that they collectively do well, like arts, crafts or food,” believes Kiat. “These are traditional but forward-thinking businesses who are already on social media and working with each other. The lessons we all learned here have convinced me that people, volunteers and businesses, can do it.”

Kiat explained that such a concept could be propagated via a forum for Lincolnshire market towns, so the Louth Pie Day team agreed to work on a ‘guidance pack’ that will give a walkthrough of how the event happened, its framework and milestones which can be reused and applied to other towns. “The concept is simply about people in towns working together towards common goals. It’s important to keep collaborative events like Louth Pie Day as low cost as possible for businesses, to help generate very high levels of participation. Thriving, resilient town centres packed with unique, specialist independent shops provide an essential antidote to the disappointing trend of identikit high streets and shopping malls across the country.”

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