But there's an uncomfortable truth lurking behind the storefronts.

Because a lot of these stores are not owned by independent shopkeepers or even big multinationals.

Instead, they're controlled by private equity investors.

In fact, private equity has phoned into the UK at an unprecedented rate since Brexit, hoovering up scores of high street names such as Burger King, New Look and Pizza Express.

This is a story about the private equity raid on some of the best known high street companies in the UK in the aftermath of both Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as the UK adjusts to new economic realities, the private equity boom could pose a problem for the future of the British High Street and the millions of people who work on it.

Because most private equity is dependent on one thing.

Debt.

Let's start by unpacking how private equity works and in particular, the main tool in the industry's arsenal, the leveraged buyout.

Okay, so imagine you want to buy a little shop for say £500,000.

You use £100,000 of your own money to pay for the deposit, but you borrow the remaining £400,000, usually from a bank.

You spend another £50,000 sprucing the place up, then sell it three years later for £800,000.

That covers your costs and whatever you still owe the bank, and you pocket the difference as profit.

Now, imagine that rather than you being responsible for repaying the money you borrowed, the shop itself was responsible.

Not you, the shop.

You can walk off into the sunset with all the proceeds of the sale.

The shop's new owner now has to find a way of repaying what you borrowed.

That is sort of how leveraged buyouts work.

You buy a company and fund much of the purchase price with debt or leverage, often in the form of bonds.

So essentially you could buy a really massive company and load it up with debt to pay for your acquisition of that company.

And if the company goes bust, you don't lose as much as if you paid for the whole thing with cash.

Let's get back to the UK.

To much of its existence, it was family owned.

And until recently, it was one of the big four supermarket chains.

Well, look and you'll know our prices are low whenever you shop at Morrison's.

Look at this chart.

It shows how Morrison's valuation compares to US retailers as a multiple of their earnings.

That's just a way of comparing companies on a like-to-like basis, even if the firms aren't the same size.

And in the years immediately after Brexit, the valuations were pretty comparable until the pandemic came along.

Then look what happened.

The US retailers recovered with the post-pandemic spending bump.

Morrison's did not.

Morrison's valuation was cheaper compared to US peers, making it quite attractive for an external buyer.

So in 2021, we're just coming out of COVID lockdown.

And there is a bidding war for Morrison's between private equity firms.

The American firm Clayton DuBillier & Rice emerged victorious, paying about £7bn in October 2021.

Just a few months earlier, Morrison's had been valued at £4.5bn.

But even that inflated price seemed worthwhile because low interest rates meant it was easy to borrow a lot of money.

And Morrison's wasn't alone.

Private equity piled into Britain in a big way in the years after Brexit.

Post-Brexit, there was a lot of uncertainty in the UK economy.

I think that was compounded by the effects of COVID.

And suddenly, these American private equity companies were looking at British assets that were valued far less than they were just a few months ago.

Between 2016 and 2023, private equity companies spent nearly $200bn buying British companies.

That compares to about $81bn in Germany and $36bn in France.

Essentially, you walk down any UK high street and the chances are you're going to be looking at private equity-owned firms on either side.

The Body Shop, Pizza Express, Wagamamas, Byron Burgers.

ZZ or New Look.

In fact, there are scores of high street brands that are now controlled by private equity and similar investors.

And that was because British companies in general became a lot cheaper.

You can see that in this chart.

Publicly traded American companies simply became a lot more valuable than British ones after Brexit.

A British firm that makes $1 of profit is, on average, given $11 of value.

American firms get $20.

So remember that little shop we talked about earlier and how its purchase was financed with a lot of debt?

In the case of Morrisons, it was something like £6.6bn.

Here's the important bit.

When CDNR bought Morrisons, interest rates were low.

But since then, they have increased.

Around half of Morrisons' debt, that's around £3bn, is affected by interest rates going up.

So that debt is now much more expensive.

The reason that's a problem is that Morrisons competes with other supermarkets on price.

And now it has to pay hundreds of millions of pounds more each year in interest payments.

They were just about making enough money to pay their debt, which meant that when Aldi and Lidl came in during a cost of living crisis and cut prices, Morrisons simply couldn't keep up with them.

That's helped Aldi overtake Morrisons as the UK's fourth biggest supermarket.

To deal with the suffocating debt load, Morrisons has sold assets, including a £2.5bn deal for its petrol stations in January.

It's hoping that will let it offer lower prices to shoppers.

These problems are besetting a lot of the businesses that Private Equity has bought.

All of this really matters because Private Equity-backed companies employ 1.9 million people in the UK, and their suppliers employ another 1.3 million people.

So when these deals go wrong, it can have real-world impacts.

So it can mean higher costs of goods for consumers, and we can also see jobs lost.

This is something that a number of politicians are already quite concerned about.

How could you ensure the increased cost of borrowing won't be passed on to consumers?

We're not about sweating assets at all.

Our customer experience, CSI, is improving as we speak today, and we are absolutely focused in delivering value for our customers.

We've seen the owners of Asda, which are the billionaire Issa brothers, and TDR being hauled in front of a parliamentary committee recently, where they were questioned about so-called price gouging.

The Bank of England has been worried about increased Private Equity ownership of British companies.

They're worried about increased debt levels, and they're worried about the But with a general election on the horizon, the solution may not be as simple as imposing higher taxes on private equity deals.

It's difficult for politicians to really crack down on private equity companies, because after Brexit, Britain has been searching for external investment, and options are thinning on the ground a little bit.

Proponents of private equity firms say that the money that they bring into the UK economy is super important, because there's just not that much foreign investment coming into the country right now.

And I think that's the line that the Labour Party, if they do come into power, is going to have to tread very carefully.