“Decisive action is needed to keep away from wasting jobs, retailers and local communities, with town and city centres trying to be notably hard hit except the government acts now.” Today’s figures show just how badly the clothing sector has been affected these last 12 months. There was also higher news from the John Lewis Partnership, which owns Waitrose, on Friday. It mentioned that it might return a £300m emergency coronavirus loan to the government as buying and selling went “higher than anticipated” over Christmas. Richard Lim, chief govt of Retail Economics, defined that the rise of online had “polarised …