Nairn - Think tank suggests we are the Scottish town with the most people employed in sectors currently shut down due to Covid-19

We repost this article from the 29th of April last year because we fill that the statistics outlined by the Centre for Towns will still be similar. Our local economy is already up against it readers and we will need help long after lockdown finishes. We hope the powers that be understand our particular situation as was outlined in this reasearch. 

 

We start this article with the following tweets from the Centre for Towns organisation:

These are 20 places in Scotland with the highest proportion of working people in the four sectors. currently shut down due to #COVID19 We're including each sector, but the ranking is based on the All column of course. pic.twitter.com/QYOYA1MCn1

— Centre For Towns (@centrefortowns) April 28, 2020

Here at the Gurn the first thing that came to mind was the methodology used to determine these statistics. We asked and promptly received the following reply:

"The source is the BRES dataset, which is available at small area level. We use our own lookups to convert small area data into towns/cities/communities and aggregate up.

The link for the data resource is here fyi: https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/datasets/newbres6pub "  

We had a look at that site and it is part of the Office for National Statistics set-up. It does contain a caveat about being a prototype however. The study that Centre for Towns did for England and Wales was reported on SKY News here and in other media outlets. Readers may find that report for England and Wales entitled "COVID-19 and our Towns" of interest. 

So no report for Scotland yet but some tables published on the Centre for Town's twitter account.  Readers may also wish to explore the Centre for Town's website which looks into the economic and social dynamics of small towns, they describe themselves thus:  "The Centre For Towns is an independent non-partisan organisation dedicated to providing research and analysis of our towns. Whilst our cities receive a good deal of attention, we believe that there should be equal attention paid to the viability and prosperity of our towns."

Regular readers may have seen the Scottish Government information that we posted earlier today: "How best can the tourist and culture industry bounce back in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, asks Holyrood’s Culture Committee." 

Here at the Gurn we feel that communities such as Nairn that rely heavily on the Tourism and Culture sectors will need substantial and long lasting support when we eventually emerge from this crisis.