Studee finds true cost of students staying away from Bradford

The Covid-19 crisis has affected universities and Studee researched the true cost of the pandemic for university cities and towns in the last six months.

It looked at areas including financial lose in socialising, food takeaways, transport, groceries, clothes and shopping; health and wellbeing and gifts and charity.

Lockdown has been tough for all areas of the country, but for those that have a large student population, the pandemic has been economically catastrophic.

High streets up and down the UK saw an 18.8 per cent drop of non-food purchases in the three months to August, demonstrating the true cost that covid-19 had. Remove a huge proportion of a town's population and the financial impact was even worse.

Studee found London had lost the most, £580 million, in the last six months. Followed by Cardiff and Glasgow, who have both lost £120m.

This compares to Bradford, which has lost an estimated £20.2m over the last six months.

Here is the Bradford breakdown:

• Over £20.2m lost from Bradford in the past six months

• Bradford food takeaways lost £2.7m

• £1.3m not spent on socialising

• £1.5m not spent on clothes

• £3m lost on transport

• £8.4m not spent on groceries

• £1.5m not spent buying clothes

• £1.5m was lost in the health and wellbeing sector

Bradford business bosses say the loss of students from further afield is having an impact on the city's footfall, but it is faring better than other locations across the country in difficult times.

Jonny Noble, Bradford BID manager

Jonny Noble, BID manager, said: “There’s no doubt that students being sent home early at the start of lockdown had a significant impact on businesses in the city centre, and their limited return at the start of this new academic year, along with many office staff continuing to work from home, is certainly hampering efforts to grow footfall back to pre-lockdown levels.

Both University of Bradford and Bradford College students are an extremely important part of the local economy and local community life and the shortfall in their spend in shops, on transport and in hospitality venues is adding to the devastating damage that Covid-19 continues to inflict

“According to this research, Bradford’s student economy has been less affected by the pandemic than many other major cities and we believe this could be down to the fact that the university has a much larger intake of students from the surrounding region than is the case in many other places.

“Students from whatever home location are extremely welcome in Bradford and there’s no doubt that our BID members will be looking forward to welcoming them back fully when we’re able to do so.”

Val Summerscales, secretary of the Bradford Chamber of Trade, said: “Coronavirus has caused disruption to all businesses and to the people that use them.

“Bradford is faring a lot better than most, which is reflected in this table.

The pandemic has changed a lot of Bradford businesses. A lot of businesses have opted to sell and liaise online

“They are carrying on under the circumstances.”