Volumes fell to a wastefulness of -10 per cent in the sentiment survey published by the CBI, which had recorded 5 per cent growth the month before.
Retailers moreover said their staff headcounts had fallen at the fastest pace since February 2009 and the produce of the financial crisis. The survey by the employers’ group is the latest to show that weak sales and increasingly than a year of soaring financing have led to circumspection among retailers well-nigh hiring new staff.
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The survey of 123 respondents, 46 of which were retailers, asked merchantry leaders whether their company’s performance on a given metric had increased or decreased and weighted responses based on the size of the visitor to requite a wastefulness between -100 per cent and 100 per cent, where a positive icon indicates growth.
Businesses’ intentions to invest moreover have fallen at the quickest pace since May 2020, during the first pandemic lockdown.
Separate research by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation found that the number of people hired for full-time jobs contracted at the fastest rate in increasingly than two years in April, while temporary recruits unfurled to rise.
Martin Sartorius, principal economist at the CBI, said: “Retailers protract to squatter a challenging trading environment, with firms reporting disappointing sales and formidable inflationary pressures. As a result, they are having to cut when on the size of their workforce and investment plans.”
However, there were reasons for retailers to be increasingly optimistic, he said: “Consumer sentiment has been improving and households’ energy bills are set to ripen from July. The resulting uplift to incomes should help to support retail sales going into the second half of this year.”
Samuel Tombs, senior UK economist at the Pantheon Macroeconomics consultancy, said household incomes would goody from the fall in the energy price cap spoken yesterday and the expected slowdown in the pace of price rises in the coming months, but rising mortgage financing and cautious hiring by employers would offset some of the benefits.
