York has been revealed to have one of the healthiest high streets in the UK, according to the Royal Society for Public Health.
The City of York placed sixth in the top ten ‘healthiest’ high streets. It came in behind cities such as Edinburgh and Canterbury, but beat Exeter and Cambridge.
Meanwhile York’s neighbours, Grimsby and Bradford, placed in the top ten ‘unhealtheist’ UK high streets.
Cities were graded using a ‘Richterscale of health’ in which positive scoring shops and businesses where said to promote health, and negatively scoring shops and businesses where supposed to lower it.
The most positive types of business where pharmacies, health clubs, libraries, cafes, museums and, wait-for-it… Vape shops. Convenience stores came in neutral while negative scoring businesses included high cost credit outlets, fast food restaurants, bookmakers ,off-licences, tanning shops and empty buildings.
The Righter scale of health scored businesses on four areas: Encouraging healthy/healthier lifestyle choices, promoting social interaction, allowing greater access to health care and promoting mental wellbeing.
Following this result, the RSPH has made recommendations. These include reviewing tax rates to ensure online businesses don’t have an unfair advantage to high street traders. Facebook and Google to provide discounted advertising opportunities to local, independent health promoting businesses and councils to set differential rent classes for tenants based on how health-promoting their business offer is.
You can read the full report here.
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