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It is another baking hot day in the UK – and new data from the British Retail Consortium shows that heatwaves are hitting high street footfall, as people seek refuge from the sun by staying indoors.

Total UK footfall dropped 3.4% in June compared with the same period last year, and accelerated from a 2.6% annual drop in May, it found. The fall was even starker on high streets, which dropped 6.2% in June, down from a drop of 1.5% in May.

Footfall dropped in June as the record heatwave kept many shoppers indoors. High streets saw the sharpest declines, while air-conditioned shopping centres and retail parks proved more resilient.

While London and the South East – where temperatures were highest – registered the biggest decline, other regions performed markedly better. Scotland saw footfall rise, buoyed by cooler weather and the continued gradual opening of Glasgow City Centre after March’s devastating Union Corner fire.

We take all allegations seriously and we will conduct our own internal review into those allegations to get to the root cause of those. But what I can assure everybody…is that the control room is staffed by experienced, expert engineers that take real pride in their job, that they are authorised to make the decisions they make and only authorised people can make those decisions.

In terms of recording information, obviously those engineers in the control room are dispatching the generation across the nation and that is done through computer systems where there is clear records and logs of decisions that have been made, both at our end of the computer system and at the receiving end. So our investigation will look into all of that. We will get clarity as to what actually happened very soon.