Revitalising West Midlands Town Centres and High Streets: A Comprehensive Assessment of Footfall Data Collection

This report sets out the current evidence base around data collection for town centres and high streets in the West Midlands Combined Authority area (i.e., the West Midlands metropolitan area) with a focus on footfall data. It also sets out the recommendations for transforming and improving the evidence base as a foundation for strategic planning and service delivery for revitalising our town centres and high streets.

Town centre and high street data is used to inform activities including strategy development, service design, funding proposals, and monitoring and evaluation across a range of service areas including transport, regeneration, business support, Culture, Night-Time and visitor economy. It is seen as an important – though not panacean – performance indicator with a broad set of applications.

This report is informed by a workshop held by the West Midlands Combined Authority and Office for National Statistics (ONS) Local on 18 October 2024 with local authority and partner organisation stakeholders on town centre and high street footfall data with support from the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub at University of Birmingham. A further workshop was held on 29 November with officers representing the region’s Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) to determine how their high street and footfall data needs may be best met.

Various manual and digital methods are used to produce footfall data, at different levels of sophistication, reliability, and cost. The main methods are sensor-derived footfall counts (e.g., infrared, laser, optical cameras) and samples based on mobile phone data (e.g., cell tower triangulation via network operators, or assisted-GPS data collected through mobile apps). Costs vary significantly between different options, with costs of around £8k-£10k to cover a single area, although there can often be significant economies of scale using mobile-based data. The table below sets out a comparison of the main footfall counting methods.

All seven constituent local authorities of the WMCA use footfall data. It is also an essential evidence base for the private sector, in particular, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). However, there is no consistency in how footfall data is collected, analysed, used, or shared.

Financial constraints prevent the optimal use of footfall and related data (e.g. transport, consumer spending) in organisational decision making. Both the cost of producing or procuring data and of resourcing sufficient analytical capacity are seen as impediments despite the recognised utility of footfall data across multiple service areas. Procurement decisions are often driven by cost only, rather than value for money. For budgetary reasons, no local authority is planning to renew their existing footfall data contract, nor replace the current solution with an alternative.

Footfall data sharing is not currently standard practice across organisations. Exchanging information was seen as an opportunity to add value – through contextualising local data and facilitating benchmarking – and to potentially save cost. The lack of a common methodology though led to concerns that incompatible methods would lead to incomparable results, undermining the potential value of data sharing. There was also concern around securing permissions from data providers.

Apart from footfall data, BIDs held varying degrees of local data including parking utilisation, social media engagement metrics, levy payer surveys, vacancy rates, retail mix, and warden-collected anti-social behaviour data. The exact data mix varied significantly depending on the size of and funding available to each BID.

Local authority representatives proposed the opportunity for a peer / user network was proposed to support cross-organisational sharing of market research, practices, systems, and data, and to advocate for the use of and access to both footfall data and wider town centre and high street data such as vacancy rates, air quality, and retail and hospitality employment. Cross-organisational working was seen as a long time coming and an opportunity to both recognise common challenges and to progress project-based work to resolve them.

Workshop participants considered what the minimum acceptable, intermediate, and maximum envisaged scope for footfall counting could look like in the West Midlands. As a minimum, there should be reliable, sharable daily unique visitor counts suitable for trend analysis covering at least one large area per constituent authority and dating back three to five years; reported as a document, spreadsheet, or dashboard; with access to technical / analytical support from the supplier. This would ideally be available in line with the first multi-year integrated settlement (from April 2026), through a joint procurement by bringing funding together.

The maximum envisaged scope, in contrast, will include unique visitor counts with further attributes including visit time, duration and purpose; transactions by vendor; and visitor origin, movement pattern, travel mode, and socioeconomic / demographic characteristics covering every identified centre in the region, precise to the level of an individual property, dating back 15 years; reported at one minute intervals via a live API feed into in-house analytical platforms, with results benchmarked against socioeconomically and geographically comparable locations both regionally and nationally. As with the minimum acceptable product, there will be a need for joint technical / analytical support.

Alongside footfall data, BIDs sought other auxiliary high street data including spend, crime rates, council-owned parking, property ownership, business mix and profitability, transport, hotel occupancy rates; non-domestic rate-payer, rateable value, retail/commercial lettings, and home working/office working data – ideally presented as comparative reports (monthly or quarterly) with access to dashboards; alongside better notifications for planning and licensing applications and roadworks.

The following sets out various options for the future of footfall counting in the West Midlands:

Doing nothing is not an option – budgetary pressures mean that the region’s current, incomplete and inconsistent picture of its high streets and town centres can only worsen. This means that not only will the West Midlands continue to have no consistent or comparable understanding of its high streets, but it will only get worse.

The solution is for there to be sufficient resources to invest in a unified approach whereby the region can procure a region-wide footfall counting solution providing a comprehensive understanding of the region’s town centres and high streets; or to develop a team capable of meeting the evidence requirements for the region’s town centre and high streets. This will require sufficient buy-in from stakeholders, in particular, all the region’s local authorities and business improvement districts. There are risks in this long-term solution given the budgetary challenges, potential risk of only partial buy-in, and continued underinvestment in this area.

The interim solution, therefore, is to establishing a peer network where the needs of local authorities and business improvement districts in the region are better understood; and where the needs of the sector can be better articulated, whether it is in the repurposing of existing data at a regional level such as mobile phone data, or engagement with ONS Local and the Mayoral Data Council, or in the exploration of more comprehensive approaches such as pooling budgets.

The WMCA will be establishing an external High Streets Officer Group which will consider this and other data collection as part of its wider strategic remit. The group will be tasked with working up the options for consideration into a costed paper / resource ask so that these options can be more fully articulated.