SUN SHINES ON BELFAST HARBOUR ANNUAL GOLF DAY

Belfast Harbour’s annual charity golf day attracted a good turn out on what was a warm sunny summer’s day at the Malone Golf Course in Belfast; it is a fine championship course situated on 330 acres of undulating wooded parkland.

Players on the day discovered the course to be a real challenge with mature trees shaping many of the holes with the beautiful natural trout lake which extends for some 25 acres first comes into play on the 13th. Then there was the 15th where the tee shot to a tricky undulating green is over water all the way, while the

18th is daunting where almost any ball to the right of the green is water bound. On the day, thanks to the generosity of all those who took part a total of £630.00 was raised for the Mission to Seafarers, with Belfast Harbour topping up that to a round £1,000.

Predicting requirements seven or eight months ahead is always a nightmare, and this year looks particularly fraught. There is, of course, a ‘cost of living crisis’ but strangely, although full figures are not yet in, it looks as though consumer spending in the Easter peak held up much better than expected – indeed, anecdotally it appears that some retailers and suppliers were short of stock as demand exceeded their somewhat gloomy expectations. Price inflation remains painfully high, but may decline rapidly over the course of the year. Or we may be trapped in a rerun of the high-inflation Seventies – both views are available, often from the same economic forecasters. One rather firmer prognostication is that e-retailing seems to have found its new natural level –around a quarter of retail trade. So omnichannel is the way forward for many retailers, with the additional complexity that this brings to warehouse space planning. Given the uncertainties, many firms will have held back on committing to space for the winter peak, and some, with pressure on margins and anticipating subdued trading, will have decided not to renew leases on some of their existing estate. That in itself is no bad thing – in our experience it very rarely makes sense for a business to scale its ‘permanent’ warehousing facilities to accommodate the