OMICRON fears and restriction changes dampened the festive mood for retailers in Southampton last December.

Visits to the city centre declined during what is traditionally one of the biggest shopping weeks of the calendar, with a 17 per cent drop in Southampton footfall in the week before Christmas in 2021.

GO! Southampton, the Business Improvement District (BID) for Southampton city centre, said Plan B restrictions had a "significant impact."

A spokesperson said: "On the strength of our data, there can be little doubt that the Plan B restrictions had a significant impact on our businesses and visitor numbers over Christmas.

"After the ‘work from home’ announcement, we saw a 6.3 per cent visitor decline in the city with the week leading up to Christmas being down 17 per cent on 2019 footfall figures."

The BID said that on December 18 2021, what is meant to be the busiest day of the year, Southampton had fewer than 20,000 visitors.

This was 32.6 per cent less than the busiest day of the Christmas period on November 20 2021.

The spokesperson added: "We can see that November had more visitors than December 2021, however on average people were spending more whilst they were in the city in November and December.

"We hope once Plan B restrictions are lifted next week, we can get more people back into the city to support our business and the wider local economy."

According to Centre for Cities’ annual economic assessment of the UK’s largest urban areas, Covid-19 has cost some city and large town centres in the South East more than half a year’s worth of potential takings since March 2020.

The findings revealed Southampton lost 38 weeks of sales between the first lockdown in March 2020 and Omicron's onset.

Nationally, Covid-19 has cost businesses in city and large town centres more than a third (35 per cent) of their potential takings since March 2020.

Deputy leader of Southampton City Council and cabinet member for growth, Cllr Jeremy Moulton said it was "inevitable" that further restrictions would affect businesses.

He said: "With the huge success of the booster campaign the government has now announced the lifting of Plan B restrictions. We are working hard to support businesses that have been most impacted by the pandemic and particularly those impacted by the Omicron variant in the hospitality, leisure, cruise and tourism related sectors.

"We are not only distributing additional grants to businesses (all details on our website) but we are supporting businesses with free evening parking and £1 bus fares into the city.

"We are also working with GO! Southampton on the Big City Clean which will really help to make our city and district centres to look their best and increase the confidence of visitors to come back out shopping.

"Southampton is well placed to make a great comeback with our premier shopping, our vibrant nightlife and restaurant scene and of course our bid to become UK City of Culture."