Council invites retail data company to town

Council bosses have invited a national retail data company to visit Dudley so they can see the town for themselves.

Regeneration chiefs at the authority have written to the Local Data Company (LDC) after they recently published inaccurate figures of the number of vacant units in the town centre.

LDC carry out surveys once a year but release figures every six months and the validity of the statistics are regularly questioned by local authorities and the national Association of Town Centre Management. However despite these concerns, in February the company published more figures that continued to use the same outdated boundaries and flawed methodology to produce their findings.