Edinburgh's hospitality sector needs Covid recovery plan – Stephen Jardine

It’s not good to be jealous but when it comes to people who live in Los Angeles, I’ll make an exception.

Last summer Vilnius turned the city centre into a giant outdoor café without causing a surge in deaths from Covid. Edinburgh needs similar smart-thinking for when lockdown restrictions begin to ease, says Stephen Jardine (Picture: Tim Goode/PA)

Not only do they have a great climate but from this week they get to enjoy it while eating outdoors again.

After a two-month closure to coincide with the latest Covid spike, outdoor eating spaces are once more open for business. With cases falling across Los Angeles County, public health officials say the time is right to cautiously restart the beleaguered hospitality sector.

We are still a long way from that point here despite evidence presented last week to show hospitality is perhaps not the threat we thought it was.

In a submission to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, the director of public health at Sheffield County Council, Greg Fell, said: “Most of the transmission events are within households. Hospitality doesn’t crop up as a terribly big risk on our radar.”

That said, we should eliminate whatever risk we can at the moment but looking ahead we need a plan and that has two requirements.

The Scottish government needs to set the timeframe for the reopening of hospitality and the parameters to do so safely and they will do that in due course. Then local authorities need to look at what they can do to support the sector to help breathe new life into our moribund town and city centres.

In Edinburgh, that responsibility falls with the city council and so far the silence has been deafening. It may seem a way off at the moment but we will reach a stage this spring where infection rates will be low enough to allow the cautious reopening of restaurants and bars. So what is the big plan?

In reality, this summer is not likely to look that much different from last summer in terms of restrictions. But last year we saw some smart thinking from others. Like Edinburgh, Vilnius is a World Heritage Site but unlike Scotland’s capital, the authorities decided to turn the city centre into a giant outdoor café. It was an enormous success in the peak summer months and yet over that time, only seven people died from Covid in the whole of Lithuania.

Other cities also took an active approach to helping the hospitality sector operate safely. In Toronto, the authorities stripped back regulations and fees to help clusters of restaurants and cafes work together to open outside.

Most of these initiatives were pulled together very quickly and are currently suspended due to the second surge, but they will return. If it all happened too quickly for Edinburgh last year, what is the excuse this year?

This week the council unveiled a three-year business plan ticking all the predictable boxes about ensuring well-being and becoming a net-zero city. But what does that actually mean and how will we go about filling empty shops and offices and stimulating businesses into recovery to pay for a greener, fairer Edinburgh?

This week in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Phil the Groundhog came out of his lair and predicted six more weeks of winter. If a small North American rodent can emerge from hibernation and get its act together in the midst of a pandemic, surely it’s not too much to expect the City of Edinburgh Council to do the same?

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