You hopefully won’t have been able to avoid noticing Retail Week’s Backing UK Retail campaign, which we’ve been running across the magazine and website throughout January. Events this week show exactly why the campaign is needed.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the Government pledging up to£2.3bn in support for the car industry. These are unprecedented times and the combination of a collapse in demand and disappearance of credit mean that drastic measures are needed if the UK’s manufacturing base is to be protected.

Retail is one of the only significant sectors of the UK economy still standing on its own two feet, but for many the legs are crumbling. No one is asking for huge handouts to keep failing businesses going, but what retail does need is a level playing field and a recognition of the immense damage that rises in the costs of doing business and the difficulty of obtaining credit and insurance will do to the industry’s already fragile state.

Take the rises in business rates retailers will face both this year and next, which are likely to total over 20 per cent. They are not the fault of the Government, but of a system based on quirks of timing that will load a massive burden from office and warehouse-based businesses onto retailers, which will cost jobs and businesses. Intervention is needed.

The Government has shown it is willing to take radical action to help UK businesses in other sectors through these extraordinary times. It’s time it now showed that it too is Backing UK Retail.

Welcome support

The increasing hardship being faced by people who work in retail is being reflected in a big increase in the demand for the services provided by the Retail Trust. The industry charity does an excellent job supporting people in retail who hit trouble in their personal lives, and the esteem in which its work is held was reflected by the enormous generosity shown by many of the industry’s biggest names at Monday’s Retail Trust ball. It is a cause everyone in the industry should support.