13,500 shop will close for their last time in what has been a brutal year for independent retailers – London Business News | Londonlovesbusiness.com

2024 was another brutal year for the retail sector, especially for small independent retailers, with around thirty-seven shops, every single day, pulling down their shutters for the final time.

Almost 13,500 retail shops, the length and breadth of the UK, closed for good up 28% on 2023 levels.

Provisional figures compiled by industry experts at the Centre for Retail Research reveal that during the 2024 calendar year 13,479 shops on high streets, main shopping destinations, towns and villages, as well as small shopping parades, closed for good – up 28.4% on the 10,494 shops that closed in the previous calendar year.

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More than half of all stores closed, 7,537 in total, were closed through retailers undergoing some form of insolvency proceedings whilst a further 5,942 shops were closed through “rationalisation” as part of cost cutting programs by large retailers or independents simply shutting up shop for good.

Independent retailers, typically those small businesses with 1 to 5 stores, accounted for 84.1% of all store closures during 2024. In the previous calendar year independents were responsible for 74.5% or 7,793 of all store closures. The number of shops owned by independent retailers that shuttered in 2024 was up a staggering 45.5% year on year.

According to the commercial real estate firm Altus Group, the cut in the business rates discount from 75% to 40% in April announced at the 2024 Autumn Budget, will see the average shop’s rates bill spiral from £3,589 to £8,613 for 2025/26.

Alex Probyn, President of Property Tax at Altus Group, said after a brutal year for independent retailers that it was “foolhardy” to scale back the targeted relief which specifically helps small retailers adding “despite Labour’s manifesto recognition of the undue burden business rates place on our high streets, that burden will be significantly increased.”

The Centre for Retail Research Director, Professor Joshua Bamfield, said “Last year we said that the improvement in the figures for store closure was best seen as ‘less bad’ rather than ‘good’ and not one that reflected any strength in the sector.”

Bamfield added “whilst the results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting with worse set to come in 2025.”

The Centre for Retail Research say that they expect store closures to rise to around 17,350 during 2025 with around 14,660 coming from independent retailers.