Over the last few years, UK businesses have been hit hard due to the COVID-19 crisis – particularly in the retail sector, causing closures and in the worst cases, insolvencies.

And, despite business resuming as usual for the second half of 2021, the spread of the Omicron variant threatens closures once again. In recent news, consumer confidence has been hit due to ‘confusing guidelines’ and UK company insolvencies have risen over pre-pandemic levels.

But which areas were retail businesses worst hit, causing them to file for insolvency?

To discover which areas in the UK were the most affected by COVID-19, Wholesale Clearance has compiled a list of the top 10 places that suffered from the most retail insolvencies between March 2020 and September 2021.

Taking the top spot is Norwich with a whopping 8.27 businesses shutting down out of every 100 and a total of 49 insolvencies.

The pandemic has had a pronounced impact on the retail industry, due to several lockdown restrictions throughout 2020 and 2021, as well as the ongoing opening and closing that many non-essential stores had to deal with during the rollout of the government’s tier system.

The impact of the local tier restrictions and national lockdowns meant the government then introduced on the 1st of November 2020, the Local Restrictions Support Grant (LRSG), which aimed to support businesses in the worst-hit areas that were forced to close or face reduced demand because of restrictions.

For Norwich, in particular, the need for additional support was crucial during the winter of 2020, when they experienced a high volume of COVID cases and were put into Tier 4 – resulting in the closure of all non-essential stores.