Thank you for inviting us to speak and for focusing on the north-east.
The region has faced real challenges throughout the pandemic. That began with the significant decline in the oil price at the start of the pandemic. It dropped to around $20, which had an immediate impact on the region.
Members might have seen that, at the height of that period, Oil and Gas UK predicted that up to 30,000 jobs could be lost from the industry in the coming 12 to 18 months if we did not take further action to support the industry. We might speak later about the broader impact on employment.
As well as that, the region has faced other clear challenges. The clearest that most members will be aware of is the local lockdown in Aberdeen city during August. That in particular involved a number of core challenges, the first being the closure of our hospitality industry.
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At that time, support schemes were not defined for local lockdowns. Although the Scottish Government, local authorities and others worked well with business to define those schemes and to get them rolled out, at the time that we entered the local lockdown we had not yet defined, either at United Kingdom or at Scottish Government level, clear grant and support schemes for local lockdown, although the furlough scheme was in place at a UK level. Obviously, that was a core challenge.
In addition, the hospitality sector went into the challenges of the lockdown at pace. For example, according to data from Aberdeen City and Shire Hotels Association, a number of hotels lost up to tens of thousands of pounds in business cancellations and faced other direct challenges from that.
Finally, we have seen in a number of other factors some clear impacts of the local lockdown in August. First, because of that hospitality drop, the broader retail sector has seen a subsequent drop in footfall. Equally, our hospitality sector missed out on the eat out to help out scheme, which was a clear driver of consumer activity during August. The Government has released some constituency-level data for that scheme, from which we can clearly see that easily hundreds of thousands of pounds of custom has been lost to hospitality businesses. Obviously, that will have a knock-on impact on retail footfall, too.
I point to those as at least some of the core challenges.