MAKE NightMix Index

Building a model for first rate NTE metrics 

Back in 2008, when the only news about the evening (and particularly) night-time economy seemed to be bad news, the MAKE team questioned why nobody had ever properly measured the benefits of the evening and night-time economy. Surely the ENTE created value and opportunities as well as challenges?  

To put this right, we spent two years working with a team of economists to help us develop the world’s first model to quantify the economics of the ENTE. That model is NightMix. 

Could you… employee more people, grow the arts after dark, tell a new story? 

NightMix’s benefit modelling answers questions such as: How much is my city’s ENTE worth? How many people does it employ? Which neighbourhoods, towns and ENTEs are growing / shrinking? Which other towns and cities are the competitors to my ENTE? It also helps us understand current and potential ENTE diversity, for example, how are food businesses trading against the entertainment sector; and are alcohol-led destinations declining as societal tastes and socialising practices change? 

NightMix modelling helps regeneration professionals, planners, economists, investors, BIDs, town and city managers, as well as governments, measure the scale, diversity, growth and historic performance town and city centres after dark. It’s the data that no strategy for any town or city’s ENTE should be without, but which is so often (in fact, nearly always) missing.

You can put a price on a great night-time economy

While, much of our NightMix modelling has been performed for local ENTE strategies (previous work ranges from Bury to Westminster; Liverpool to Sydney), once a year we produce ‘The NightMix Index’.  

The NMI ranks the turnover of each of the UK’s 382 relevant local authority ENTEs. When we first measured it 2010 Westminster was No.1 with £2.9bn of the UK’s £66bn ENTE total turnover. In 2019 the figure for the UK ENTE is now £105bn (Incidentally, that’s six times larger than the UK car industry, three times the UK fashion industry, and more than twice the value of the telecommunications sector). Even the smallest NTE - the Isles of Scilly - is worth over £30m to the islands.  

We now use NightMix as a key part of measuring the benefits component of our MAKE Night-time Economy Costs and Benefits Analysis (NTE-CBA). For more information about MAKE’s NightMix service and costs…