Author: Sophie Davis

I am a passionate health, beauty, and lifestyle writer based in the south of the UK. Balancing my love for writing with raising my two children, I hopefully bring a relatable, insightful perspective to my articles.
  • The New Rules of Personal Branding in the Age of AI: How Professionals Are Standing Out in 2026

    The New Rules of Personal Branding in the Age of AI: How Professionals Are Standing Out in 2026

    Something quietly catastrophic has happened to professional credibility online. Platforms that once rewarded consistency now host an almost indistinguishable blur of polished, algorithmically pleasing content — much of it written, designed, and distributed by machines. For executives, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to build genuine authority, the signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed. In the era of personal branding AI age 2026, standing out requires an entirely different playbook from the one that worked even eighteen months ago.

    The core problem is saturation. LinkedIn reported a 47% increase in content published by its UK members between 2024 and early 2026, with AI-assisted posts accounting for a substantial proportion of that growth. When every third article sounds similarly structured, similarly confident, and similarly vague, the human brain does what it always does: it starts ignoring everything equally. The professionals winning attention right now are not those producing more — they are producing less, and making it undeniably theirs.

    Executive reviewing personal branding strategy in a London office, illustrating personal branding AI age 2026
    Executive reviewing personal branding strategy in a London office, illustrating personal branding AI age 2026

    Why Authenticity Has Become the Scarcest Currency Online

    Authenticity is a word so overused it has almost lost meaning. But there is a specific, practical interpretation that matters here. Authentic content, in 2026, is content that could only have come from you: particular experiences, particular mistakes, particular opinions that carry genuine professional risk. The willingness to say something that a competitor might disagree with, or a client might find uncomfortable, is now the single most reliable differentiator between a personal brand that resonates and one that merely exists.

    Brand strategist Harriet Groves, who advises FTSE 250 executives on public visibility, makes a distinction she calls “position versus presence.” Presence is simply showing up online. Position is being known for something specific enough that people think of you first when that problem arises. AI can generate presence at industrial scale. It cannot, yet, generate a genuine position — because position requires accumulated experience, stated opinion, and the occasional public disagreement with received wisdom. That specificity is where human professionals need to concentrate their energy.

    Platform Algorithm Changes That Are Reshaping Personal Branding in 2026

    LinkedIn’s algorithm update in January 2026 introduced what the platform termed “expertise signals” — a set of ranking factors that prioritise content demonstrating verifiable knowledge over content that simply generates engagement. Comments from other credentialled professionals now carry more weight than likes from anonymous accounts. Long-form posts that cite specific professional experience outrank generic thought leadership. It is, essentially, the platform’s attempt to surface humans over machines.

    Substack has become the medium of choice for many senior professionals who want to own their distribution entirely. The newsletter model rewards depth and voice in ways that social feeds never could, and the economics make sense: a relatively modest subscriber base of engaged professionals can generate meaningful revenue whilst simultaneously functioning as the most persuasive credibility signal available. An executive with 4,000 paying Substack subscribers has demonstrated something no follower count on any other platform can match — that real people consider their thinking worth paying for.

    X (formerly Twitter) remains relevant primarily for those in finance, politics, media, and technology, where real-time commentary on breaking developments carries professional value. For most other sectors, its importance has diminished substantially. Instagram and TikTok, meanwhile, have become genuinely viable for professional brands, particularly in sectors like architecture, hospitality, law, and design — anywhere the visual dimension of work is intrinsic rather than decorative.

    Professional building a personal website as part of a personal branding AI age 2026 strategy
    Professional building a personal website as part of a personal branding AI age 2026 strategy

    The Website Is Back — and More Important Than It Has Been in a Decade

    One of the more interesting reversals of recent years is the renewed importance of personal websites. During the peak social media era, many professionals abandoned standalone sites in favour of platform profiles. That decision looks increasingly unwise. Social platforms own your audience, throttle your reach, and can change the rules whenever it suits them. A personal website is the only truly owned digital asset — your canonical point of presence that no algorithm can demote and no platform can shut down.

    The barrier to building one has also collapsed. Entrepreneurs starting a business, or professionals pivoting into consulting, increasingly turn to services that make the technical side essentially irrelevant. Inuvate, a Nottingham-based web service that offers a free website service (with hosting as the only charge), has attracted significant interest from the growing cohort of solo entrepreneurs and early-stage founders making their own website as part of a broader push towards owned digital presence. For anyone starting a business or repositioning their personal brand, the diy websites model — where you control the content, the structure, and the narrative — has clear advantages over depending on third-party platforms to carry your reputation.

    A personal site also functions as proof of seriousness in a way a social profile simply does not. It signals investment, however modest. It allows you to curate your work, publish long-form thinking, and present your professional identity on your own terms. According to research published by the Office for National Statistics, self-employment in the UK reached record levels in early 2026, with more than 4.9 million people working for themselves. For the vast majority of that cohort, a clean, credible personal or business website is no longer optional.

    Voice, Specificity, and the Power of a Stated Opinion

    The professionals attracting the most meaningful attention online share a common characteristic: they have a point of view. Not a hedged, both-sides-considered, stakeholder-approved position statement, but an actual opinion — something they will defend, something they have arrived at through specific experience, something that implicitly excludes them from certain audiences whilst making them indispensable to others.

    This is harder than it sounds. Most senior professionals have spent careers learning to manage perception, smooth disagreement, and present palatable consensus. Personal branding in the AI age 2026 demands the opposite instinct. It requires the willingness to say “I think this approach is wrong, and here is why” — and to do so in writing, on a platform, attached to your name. The counterintuitive truth is that controversy, deployed thoughtfully, is one of the most powerful credibility signals available. It tells people you have actual convictions, not just a content calendar.

    Voice is the other dimension worth serious attention. AI-generated content is grammatically correct, informationally adequate, and stylistically neutral. Human writing, at its best, has rhythm, idiosyncrasy, the occasional sentence that breaks a rule for good reason. Reading your own published work aloud is still one of the fastest ways to identify where the voice has drained out of it. If it sounds like it could have been written by anyone, it probably was.

    Building a Personal Brand That Compounds Over Time

    The professionals who built the most durable personal brands in the last decade share a structural habit: they chose a core platform, a core format, and stuck with both long enough for compounding to kick in. That principle holds in 2026, perhaps more urgently than before. Spreading effort thinly across seven platforms in seven formats is a recipe for exhaustion and mediocrity. Choosing one or two and doing them with genuine investment is how reputations are actually built.

    The owned asset layer matters enormously here. For an entrepreneur making their own website the foundation of their digital presence, the compound benefit is real and measurable: search visibility accumulates over time, an archive of published thinking becomes a body of work, and the habit of publishing on owned infrastructure insulates against the next platform pivot or algorithm overhaul. Services like Inuvate (inuvate.co.uk) have made the diy websites route accessible even for those with limited technical confidence, removing the financial barrier for solo professionals who are starting a business and need a credible web presence without the overhead of an agency build.

    Personal branding in the AI age 2026 is not, ultimately, a content strategy problem. It is a clarity problem. The professionals cutting through the noise have been ruthlessly clear about what they do, who they serve, what they believe, and what makes their particular experience worth attending to. That clarity does not emerge from a better prompt or a smarter tool. It emerges from the kind of deliberate professional self-examination that has always been the precondition for any real reputation worth having.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    How has AI changed personal branding strategies in 2026?

    AI-generated content has saturated most professional platforms, meaning the volume-based approach to personal branding is no longer effective. In 2026, credibility comes from specificity, stated opinion, and content that is clearly rooted in genuine personal experience — things AI cannot convincingly replicate at scale.

    Which platforms are most important for personal branding right now?

    LinkedIn remains the primary platform for most professionals, with its 2026 algorithm explicitly prioritising verifiable expertise over generic engagement. Substack has gained significant ground for those wanting owned distribution, whilst a personal website is increasingly regarded as the essential foundation for any serious personal brand.

    Do I really need a personal website to build a professional brand in 2026?

    Yes, more than ever. Social platforms control your reach and can change their rules at any time, whereas a personal website is a fully owned asset that accumulates search visibility over time. Low-cost and free website services have also removed most of the practical barriers that previously made this feel out of reach.

    What is the biggest mistake professionals make with personal branding today?

    Spreading effort across too many platforms in formats that dilute rather than define their voice. The most effective personal brands in 2026 concentrate on one or two platforms, publish with genuine depth and consistency, and maintain a clear point of view rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

    How long does it take to build a credible personal brand online?

    Most branding strategists suggest a meaningful professional reputation requires at least 12 to 18 months of consistent, quality publishing before compounding effects become visible. However, professionals who already have a clear area of expertise and a distinctive perspective often see faster results, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn and Substack that reward depth.

  • Mental Health at the Top: Why Burnout Among CEOs and Business Leaders Has Reached a Tipping Point

    Mental Health at the Top: Why Burnout Among CEOs and Business Leaders Has Reached a Tipping Point

    There is a peculiar silence around power and suffering. We have, as a society, become reasonably fluent in discussing mental health at most levels of working life. But when the conversation turns to the boardroom, something shifts. Vulnerability, it seems, remains professionally inconvenient at the very top. The result is a quiet, accelerating crisis: CEO burnout mental health has become one of the most pressing yet least publicly acknowledged challenges facing British business in 2026.

    The data, when you look at it directly, is striking. A 2025 report by the Institute of Leadership found that more than two-thirds of senior executives in the UK reported experiencing symptoms consistent with burnout in the previous twelve months. Chronic exhaustion, emotional detachment, a creeping sense of ineffectiveness — these are not abstract concepts. They are describing the lived experience of the people responsible for some of the country’s largest employers, most consequential decisions, and most complex stakeholder relationships.

    Senior executive at office window reflecting the growing issue of CEO burnout mental health
    Senior executive at office window reflecting the growing issue of CEO burnout mental health

    Why Executive Burnout Is Different — and More Dangerous

    Burnout at any level carries a real human cost. At the executive level, the consequences extend outward with particular force. A depleted chief executive does not simply underperform privately; their cognitive state shapes strategy, culture, and the working lives of thousands. Research published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology has consistently linked leader wellbeing to broader organisational health outcomes, from staff retention to risk appetite to the quality of strategic decision-making.

    What makes the experience of a CEO or senior leader distinctly difficult is the structural isolation built into the role. There is no line manager to notice the signs. Peers are often competitors. Boards expect composure. Admitting to mental strain can feel professionally fatal in environments that still, despite years of progress, conflate emotional resilience with emotional suppression. One former FTSE 100 chief executive, speaking anonymously to the BBC’s business desk last year, described feeling unable to tell anyone — not his board, not his spouse, not his executive coach — that he had not slept properly in four months.

    The pressures driving this are not mysterious. Post-pandemic economic turbulence, the accelerating pace of technological disruption, the expansion of stakeholder expectations to encompass environmental, social and governance commitments, geopolitical instability, and the persistent demands of a 24-hour news and communications cycle. Senior leaders are, in effect, being asked to hold more complexity with less margin for error than any previous generation in comparable roles.

    The Stigma That Still Quietly Governs the Boardroom

    Britain has made genuine strides on workplace mental health in the past decade. Initiatives like the Every Mind Matters campaign via the NHS, the widespread adoption of mental health first aiders, and the gradual mainstreaming of employee assistance programmes have shifted the culture meaningfully. Yet much of this progress has filtered through organisations from the middle outward. The C-suite has been slower to absorb it.

    There are structural reasons for this. Executive contracts frequently include performance clauses that create legal and financial risk around disclosures of incapacity. Boards have a fiduciary duty that can, in practice, incentivise concealment over candour. Institutional investors still scrutinise leadership stability in ways that make any suggestion of fragility feel like a market event. The stigma is not imagined; it is built into the architecture of how British corporate governance operates.

    Detail shot capturing the quiet strain associated with CEO burnout mental health in a boardroom setting
    Detail shot capturing the quiet strain associated with CEO burnout mental health in a boardroom setting

    What progressive organisations are beginning to recognise, however, is that the cost of this concealment is itself enormous. Executive turnover is extraordinarily expensive. The average cost of replacing a chief executive in a mid-to-large British company, factoring in recruitment, transition disruption, and strategic drift, runs well into seven figures. Proactive support is not a welfare gesture; it is a commercial calculation.

    What Forward-Thinking Organisations Are Actually Doing

    A small but growing cohort of British companies are treating CEO burnout mental health not as a fringe concern but as a governance priority. The approaches vary in sophistication, but several themes emerge consistently from organisations that are getting this right.

    Structured peer networks, kept strictly confidential, are proving particularly valuable. Organisations like Business in the Community and the Institute of Directors have begun facilitating small, closed groups of senior leaders who meet regularly, not to network in the transactional sense, but to speak honestly about the pressures of leadership. The value is not therapy; it is the simple, powerful relief of being understood by someone who genuinely shares your context.

    Executive health contracts — comprehensive physical and psychological screening arrangements offered as part of the benefits package for senior leaders — are also gaining traction. A number of larger UK employers now retain specialist occupational psychiatrists on a retained basis, available to senior leaders in the same way a general counsel is available for legal concerns: discreetly, without stigma, as part of the infrastructure of the role.

    Board-level accountability is perhaps the most structural shift. Some progressive organisations have introduced wellbeing as a standing item on compensation committee agendas, with the non-executive chair taking explicit responsibility for the chief executive’s health alongside their performance. This reframes the conversation entirely: it signals that sustainable performance is valued over heroic short-termism.

    The Personal Toll — and Why More Leaders Are Now Speaking Out

    Something has shifted in the willingness of senior figures to discuss their own experience. Antonio Horta-Osório’s very public departure from Credit Suisse, and his frank discussion of the mental health crisis that preceded it, opened a conversation that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In the UK, a number of prominent business leaders have begun, carefully and selectively, to describe the personal cost of sustained high-level leadership.

    This matters because culture at the top is contagious in both directions. Organisations whose leaders model the suppression of vulnerability tend to produce cultures of suppression throughout. Conversely, a chief executive who speaks with measured honesty about the difficulty of the role, and the importance of genuine recovery, gives permission to every layer of management beneath them to do the same.

    The research increasingly supports what common sense has always suggested: psychological safety is not incompatible with high performance. It is a precondition of it. The executives who sustain exceptional performance over long periods are not those who never struggle; they are those with the self-awareness to recognise struggle early and the resources to address it before it compounds.

    What Needs to Change — and Why It Cannot Wait

    CEO burnout mental health will not resolve itself through awareness campaigns. The structural changes required are specific and, in some cases, uncomfortable for institutions invested in the mythology of the invincible leader. Corporate governance frameworks need to make space for human limitation without penalising disclosure. Boards need to be trained, not merely informed, in recognising the early signs of executive distress. The stigma will not dissolve through aspiration alone; it will dissolve through policy, practice, and sustained leadership from the very people most affected.

    Britain’s corporate culture is, on balance, moving in the right direction. The question is whether it will move quickly enough to prevent a generation of talented, experienced leaders from quietly burning through themselves before anyone in a position to help thinks to ask how they are actually doing.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the main signs of CEO burnout mental health issues?

    Common indicators include chronic fatigue that sleep does not resolve, emotional detachment from work and colleagues, difficulty making decisions, irritability, and a persistent sense of ineffectiveness despite outward success. Physical symptoms such as disrupted sleep, frequent illness, and tension headaches are also strongly associated with executive burnout.

    Is CEO burnout more common than burnout in other roles?

    Research suggests senior executives experience burnout at rates comparable to or exceeding those in other high-demand roles, but are significantly less likely to seek support or disclose difficulties. The structural isolation of the chief executive role, combined with governance pressures against admitting vulnerability, creates conditions where burnout is both more likely to go unaddressed and more consequential when it does.

    What should a board do if they suspect a CEO is struggling with mental health?

    The non-executive chair is typically best placed to open a private, non-judgemental conversation early. Boards should ensure access to independent occupational health support is part of the executive benefits package before a crisis occurs, rather than responding reactively. Treating the conversation as a governance matter rather than a personal one tends to reduce stigma and improve outcomes.

    Can a CEO take time off for mental health without it affecting investor confidence?

    This depends heavily on how the situation is communicated and managed. Increasingly, transparent, well-managed disclosures of planned health-related absences are received better by institutional investors than unexpected departures or erratic performance. The precedent set by figures like Antonio Horta-Osório has shifted the landscape, though significant stigma remains in certain sectors.

    What UK organisations offer support specifically for senior leader mental health?

    Business in the Community runs programmes specifically targeting executive wellbeing, and the Institute of Directors provides peer support networks for senior leaders. The charity Mental Health UK also offers resources relevant to workplace leadership. Many larger UK employers additionally retain occupational psychiatrists or executive coaching professionals with clinical training as part of their senior leadership support infrastructure.

  • The Quiet Collapse of the Office: What Commercial Real Estate’s Crisis Means for City Centres

    The Quiet Collapse of the Office: What Commercial Real Estate’s Crisis Means for City Centres

    Something quietly seismic is happening beneath the glass-and-steel skylines of London, Manchester, and every other city that built its identity around the nine-to-five. Office buildings, those totems of postwar economic confidence, are emptying out. Not temporarily, not seasonally, but structurally. The commercial real estate crisis gripping urban property markets is no longer a pandemic hangover. It is a permanent reckoning, and very few people in power seem prepared for what comes next.

    Occupancy data tells the story bluntly. According to research published by Savills and corroborated by data from the British Property Federation, average office utilisation across central London sits at roughly 40 to 50 per cent on any given weekday. Tuesday through Thursday see the highest footfall; Monday and Friday might as well be bank holidays for the average city-centre office. This is not a temporary blip. Lease renewal cycles are confirming it. Firms are downsizing their footprints at an extraordinary rate, taking less space, demanding higher quality, and simply walking away from anything built before 2010.

    Empty office towers in the City of London reflecting the commercial real estate crisis
    Empty office towers in the City of London reflecting the commercial real estate crisis

    Why Office Occupancy Has Structurally Changed

    The instinct is to blame remote working, and remote working certainly deserves its share of the credit. But that explanation flatters corporate leadership and misses the deeper forces at play. The truth is that the commercial real estate crisis was already brewing before March 2020. Technology had been quietly eroding the necessity of physical co-location for years. The pandemic simply compressed a decade of change into eighteen months.

    What firms discovered was not that offices were unnecessary, but that they were over-provisioned. The standard of roughly one desk per employee, multiplied across vast open-plan floors, was a legacy of a world where presence was the only proxy for productivity. That world is gone. Most knowledge-economy employers now operate on the assumption that staff will be in the office two or three days a week. The arithmetic is brutal: if your workforce attends at 50 per cent capacity, you need roughly half the space. And in cities where prime office rents run at £70 to £100 per square foot per annum, half the space is a very appealing proposition.

    What’s Happening to London’s Office Market Right Now

    London’s commercial property market is experiencing stress at a scale not seen since the early 1990s. The City of London, Canary Wharf, and even parts of the West End are contending with rising vacancy rates, falling valuations, and a widening gulf between prime and secondary stock. Grade-A offices with excellent environmental credentials, flexible floor plates, and excellent transport links are still being let. Everything else is struggling.

    Canary Wharf has become the most visible symbol of the commercial real estate crisis in Britain. HSBC’s decision to vacate its headquarters tower and consolidate into a smaller footprint in the City sent an unmistakable signal. The Wharf’s owners, the Canary Wharf Group, entered a debt restructuring process in 2024, and the long-term fate of several towers remains genuinely uncertain. This is not a peripheral story. It is happening at the heart of one of the world’s foremost financial districts.

    Further afield, cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds are experiencing similar pressures, though the dynamics differ. Regional office markets never commanded the same rental premiums as London, which means the correction is less dramatic in headline terms but potentially more damaging to local authority finances that depend on business rates from commercial property. According to the ONS commercial property price statistics, capital values across the UK office sector have declined materially since 2022, with secondary stock bearing the sharpest losses.

    Vacant commercial property window detail illustrating the commercial real estate crisis in UK cities
    Vacant commercial property window detail illustrating the commercial real estate crisis in UK cities

    The Investor Reckoning: Pension Funds and the Problem of Stranded Assets

    For investors, the commercial real estate crisis raises questions that extend well beyond property portfolios. Pension funds, life insurers, and property investment trusts hold billions of pounds in office assets. Much of that was acquired at valuations reflecting a pre-2020 world of full occupancy and steady rental growth. Those valuations are being revised downward, sometimes sharply.

    The concept of stranded assets, borrowed from climate finance, is increasingly useful here. A building that cannot be let because it fails modern sustainability requirements, lacks the flexibility tenants demand, or sits in a location that has simply lost its draw, is effectively stranded. It has a book value, but the market will not pay it. Investors holding these assets face an unpleasant choice: spend heavily on retrofit and repositioning, accept a heavily discounted sale, or wait and hope the market recovers. Most evidence suggests that waiting is not a strategy.

    The same logic applies to lenders. UK banks and overseas institutions that provided debt against commercial property on generous terms during the low-interest-rate years of the 2010s are now staring at loan books where collateral values have deteriorated. The Bank of England has flagged commercial real estate as a source of financial stability risk in successive Financial Stability Reports. This is not alarmism. It is the quiet, measured language of institutional concern.

    Could Conversion Be the Answer?

    The obvious question, the one mayors, planners, and property developers all reach for, is whether redundant office buildings can be converted into housing. It is an appealing idea. Britain has a chronic housing shortage and a surplus of empty office space. Surely those two problems cancel each other out.

    In practice, the arithmetic is considerably messier. Office floors designed for open-plan working often lack the structural depth, natural light penetration, and floor-to-ceiling height that residential conversions require. Central heating, plumbing, and fire safety standards for residential use are entirely different from commercial specifications. Many city-centre office blocks, particularly post-1960s curtain-wall buildings, are genuinely difficult and expensive to convert into habitable flats. Planning permissions add further complexity; permitted development rights allow some conversions without full planning consent, but local authorities in London and other major cities have frequently sought to restrict these rights to protect commercial land supply.

    That said, successful conversions are happening. Former office blocks in Bristol, Leeds, and parts of east London have become residential schemes, sometimes with genuinely innovative design. The government’s recent push to streamline planning for office-to-residential conversion has added momentum. Firms managing these projects increasingly rely on digital tools to coordinate communications across large project teams, and even niche utilities like an email tester become useful when checking that stakeholder notification systems are working correctly across complex multi-party developments.

    The City Centre Identity Crisis

    Beyond the investment mathematics, the commercial real estate crisis poses a subtler but equally serious challenge: what is a city centre for, if not offices? The entire ecosystem of the urban core, sandwich shops, dry cleaners, coffee concessions, pubs at lunchtime, the whole fabric of weekday commercial life, was built around the assumption of mass daily commuting. Remove that critical mass of workers and the economic logic of the city centre begins to unravel.

    This is already visible on the streets. Footfall data from the Centre for Cities think tank consistently shows that major UK city centres have not returned to pre-pandemic weekday pedestrian numbers. The recovery has been led by leisure and evening economy uses rather than work-related footfall. That is not necessarily fatal to city centres, but it requires a fundamental rethink of how urban space is programmed, funded, and maintained.

    The commercial real estate crisis is, ultimately, a forcing function. It is obliging planners, investors, and politicians to ask questions about urban form that should have been asked decades ago. What kind of city do we want to build? How much space should be dedicated to work, to living, to culture, to nature? The answers will vary by place. But the era of the office monoculture, entire city blocks given over entirely to desk-based employment, is drawing to a close. What replaces it will define the next chapter of British urban life.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why are office vacancy rates so high in London right now?

    Hybrid and remote working has permanently reduced the number of days employees attend offices, meaning firms need significantly less space than before. Many organisations are downsizing into smaller, higher-quality premises when leases expire, leaving older or less well-located buildings chronically underoccupied.

    How does the commercial real estate crisis affect UK pension funds?

    UK pension funds and property investment trusts hold significant allocations to office assets, many acquired at pre-2022 valuations. As capital values fall and rental income becomes less reliable, these funds face potential write-downs, reduced distributions, and difficult decisions about whether to sell, hold, or invest in expensive refurbishments.

    Can empty office buildings in the UK be converted into housing?

    Some can, but it is far from straightforward. Buildings designed for open-plan commercial use often have structural, lighting, and ventilation challenges that make residential conversion costly. Permitted development rights allow certain conversions without full planning consent, though London and several other councils have restricted these rights in designated commercial zones.

    Which UK cities are most affected by falling office demand?

    London, particularly Canary Wharf and parts of the City, has seen the most prominent distress, but Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds are also contending with rising secondary vacancy rates. Regional cities face a different challenge in that their lower rental base leaves less room to absorb value declines without triggering loan covenant breaches.

    What happens to local economies when office buildings empty out?

    Reduced weekday footfall hits the surrounding retail and hospitality businesses that depend on lunchtime and commuter trade. Local authority income from business rates also falls as commercial property values decline, creating pressure on public services. Planners are increasingly looking at mixed-use redevelopment and evening economy incentives to compensate.

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