Skipton in North Yorkshire was named the UK’s happiest place to live by property website Rightmove in its Happy at Home Index – but some residents and business owners say things are not as rosy as you might think
Market traders based in the UK’s happiest town have opened up about the realities of earning a living there. Last year, Skipton in North Yorkshire was crowned the UK’s happiest place to live by property website Rightmove in its Happy at Home Index.
The area was celebrated for its affordability, with the average house price coming in at around £326,093.
Responding to the accolade, Rightmove’s property expert Colleen Babcock said: “It’s great to see the town of Skipton getting the attention it deserves this year having ranked highly in previous studies.”
Yet some six months later, residents and workers in Skipton have been speaking out about the hardships they face. Currently, there are 45 regular traders and 35 irregular traders operating within Skipton’s market.
The biggest challenges they’re up against stem from the surge in online shopping, which is having a significant knock-on effect on how much customers spend in person.
Speaking to the i newspaper, Mohammed Saghir, who has worked in Skipton for 40 years, pointed the finger squarely at the rise of online retail.
Mohammed, who owns the nearby Riviera Boutique clothes shop, also drew attention to the burden of high business rates, claiming traders were essentially paying the Government “for providing free air”. Business rates are a tax levied on commercial properties such as offices, pubs, and shops.
Mohammed also spoke of his sadness that independent shopkeepers lacked a “single voice” as they were “scattered” across the country.
His concerns were mirrored by other local traders, who spoke of customers purchasing goods from overseas in some instances, simply because they are no longer manufactured in the UK — furniture being a prime example. Market trader Mark Howard also pointed to supermarkets flogging cheap clothing as yet another obstacle facing small businesses.
The worries raised by Skipton’s traders over business rates — which generate around £28.8bn per year for local governments — come amid mounting pressure on the Labour government to overhaul the system in favour of smaller firms, as the operating cost crisis deepens.
Businesses up and down the UK have been battered by soaring costs and inflation, pushing many to the edge of collapse and beyond. The latest in a string of stark warnings came in parliamentary research published by Oxford University’s Professor Ben Lockwood and King’s College London’s Dr Eddy Tam.
Professor Lockwood argued that reducing business rates for smaller hospitality and retail firms could boost high street occupancy levels and breathe life into areas that were struggling economically compared to others.
In the research, Professor Lockwood and Professor Tam said: “The researchers found that 1 percentage point reduction in the tax rate via SBRR increased the likelihood that a property is occupied by small business by 1.06% and reduced the chance it is occupied by large business by 0.53%.”
