Grant Thornton, together with economics consultancy Retail Economics, have produced The Cut Back Economy – a detailed look at the impact of the UK cost-of-living crisis on the retail and consumer industries.
The report shows that UK retail and consumer industries are at risk of losing out on £24.9 billion of spending this financial year as nine in 10 UK consumers will be forced to reduce their spending to help cover essentials.
This has huge ramifications for speciality small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) lenders who finance small businesses in the UK retail, leisure and consumer space. In turn, it also has significant implications for larger banks, private equity (PE) firms and debt funds who finance these speciality SME lenders.
SMEs face challenging landscape
Small and medium-sized enterprises face pressure on multiple fronts. Cash reserves are being eroded by sharply rising input costs, including wage inflation and increasing supply chain costs – SMEs will be bearing the brunt of significant pressure being applied further up the supply chain. Having weathered the pandemic, SMEs now have higher debt service costs as they make repayments on government-backed loans issued during the pandemic.
There are also growing concerns that a combination of tighter monetary policy and fallout from geopolitical tensions could tip the UK into recession. Many economists expect the economy to slow rapidly in the upcoming quarters. The OECD has cut its UK growth forecast for 2023 to zero – the lowest in the G20, except Russia.
How will this affect lenders?
Against this backdrop, speciality SME lenders – together with the banks, PE firms and debt funds that finance them – must consider the effect of consumer cutbacks on SMEs. Will SMEs ability to service their debt be affected? Will there be an increase in defaults? Anecdotally, we're seeing an uptick in defaults from the SME sector. Speciality SME lenders need to aware of this, and their own financiers need to understand the knock-on effect in their own portfolio.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has recently expressed disappointment as to how SMEs are being treated by lenders, citing repeated instances of poor customer outcomes. On 12 July, the regulator wrote to lenders with SME customers saying they must treat small business customers fairly when collecting and recovery debts.
Will there be more requests for forbearance, and what effect will this have on the liquidity and capital position of the speciality SME lenders?
The Cut Back Economy landscape
Almost nine in 10 (86%) of consumers plan to cut back their spending over the next 12 months due to the rising cost of living. The average household is set to cut back £887 of their discretionary spending through to April 2023. The least affluent are projected to cut back close to 10% of their annual household spending, compared with 8.1% for the average household. Even the most affluent – the top 20% wealthiest households – are expected to cut back 7.6% of their spending, equating to a £2,654 reduction in absolute terms per year.
Collectively, the overall impact of the cost-of-living crisis is set to wipe out a potential £24.9 billion of discretionary spending across retail, leisure and consumer industries in the 12 months to April 2023. Speciality SME lenders should take time to understand these trends, and what the consequences will be for their portfolio. Equally, lenders to the speciality lenders themselves need to be mindful of these risks.
Consumer spending trends and data
Food and grocery: widespread cutbacks
- Total sector cut back: £13.9 billion
- One in two UK shoppers is cutting back on grocery spending
- The average household plans to economise on their food shop by 13%
- Major supermarkets are reporting widespread changes in shopper behaviour
Fashion: around half of all UK households intend to reduce fashion spending
- Total sector cut back: £3.7 billion
- 58% of Generation Z shoppers plan to curb fashion purchases
- The average household is looking to reduce their annual clothing spending by 11%
- With margins already squeezed, retailers face further challenge as price becomes a key differentiator
Hospitality and leisure: younger generations to rein in spending
- Total sector cut back: £8.5 billion
- Three in five under 45s plan to dine out less (this group plans to cut back significantly more than older generations across all areas of leisure and hospitality)
- The average household is expected to cut hospitality and leisure spending by 9.3%
- Hospitality firms already face rising input costs and staff shortages, which now looks set to face a potentially significant drop in trade
Holidays: most Brits determined not to miss out
- Total sector cut back: £5.6 billion
- One in three UK consumers plans to cut back on holidays – often this means seeking a cheaper destination rather than losing out altogether
- The average household is set to cut back 9.3% of hospitality and leisure spending
How will consumer behaviour change?
Our research highlights behaviours which consumers are adopting in order to seek value for money: substitution, scaling back and shopping around.
Substitution is the most common strategy adopted by consumers, with around one in two consumers actively switching to cheaper brands, retailers or service operators to combat cost pressures.
In response to the cost-of-living crisis, 43% of consumers plan to go shopping less frequently. This has obvious implications for footfall. Retailers and leisure operators will need to provide stronger incentives for consumers to visit their stores or pay for their services.
Two in five shoppers (39%) intend to do more research, compare prices and shop around for deals before committing to a purchase in the inflationary environment.
Considerations for lenders
Speciality SME lenders should review their portfolio companies to understand how vulnerable they are to reduced consumer spending in 2022 and 2023. Financiers to the SME lenders should also understand what the knock-on effect will be should there be an increase in forbearance requests or defaults.
The recent intervention from the FCA also highlights the combined operational and regulatory challenges SME lenders will face when attempting to manage financial distress in their borrower base. They'll need to manage the desire and need to be proactive in managing their customers while also being mindful of the customer journey and ensuring they are treating those customers fairly.
It remains to be seen how this forecast change in customer behaviour will impact lenders to the SME sector. We're already starting to see signs of stress among SMEs, however, and those levels of stress are likely to increase.
SME lenders will, in those circumstances, be updating their own probability of default (PD) assumptions. This will ultimately feed through to provisioning levels and that could impair their own balance sheets. Liquidity for such lenders may become a lot tighter and the combined impact may be greater stress or distress for those lenders – which in turn will provide challenges to their owners and lenders.
To help address the challenges driven by these changing market conditions, contact Andy Charters or Russell Simpson.
Camilla Fawkner
