My name is Tim Danaher, I am a Director at Brunswick. With the Christmas trading update season behind us, attention now turns to the prospect for 2012. In this short video, we talk to some of the leading experts on retail in the UK about what they think the year ahead holds in store. We discussed issues such as the impact the internet is having on retailing, what the prospects are for the recovery of consumer confidence and whether we are likely to see a recovery in the health of the high street. Here's what they had to say.

Christmas 2011 has been very mixed. Some people had a Christmas cracker; other people had a Christmas turkey sadly.

It was probably not as bad as it could have been. You saw a rise in retail sales volumes. But really, this was only achieved by fairly aggressive cost cutting. And I think without that, things would have been a lot, lot worse.

We saw October and November were pretty poor and that brought out extra discounts and more money invested in promotions and advertising. Frankly that will have hurt the bottom line and you can already see, particularly non-food retailers, we've seen a clutch of them go into administration or announce store closures.

What I think the retailers did this year was know in advance it was going to be a tough Christmas. So I think they handled their stocks, they kept their stocks low. So there wasn't as much discounting and panic as you thought there might be.

The single biggest piece of news in retail over the Christmas reporting season was Tesco saying that it was going to stop opening hypermarkets and that it felt that a more appropriate growth channel for its non-food business was online.

The retailers who I speak to, the internet is the first thing that they want to talk about. It's what they want to know about what their competitors are doing and it seems to be the big battleground for 2012.

A number of big retailers have said we are going to move more of our business model online. And that's not just transactionally, but also getting more involved with other digital ways to communicate with their customers, and that's already paying dividends for some businesses.

Online retailing is forcing people to change their game. You'll see, for example, with Argos, them becoming much more a click-and-collect type proposition.

The UK has had a high sales per square metre, and that's been one of the strengths of the UK retailing. And the internet is reducing that. So it's putting pressure on almost every retailer's sales per square metre. And when your sales intensity, your sales per square metre fall your ability to afford expensive property reduces. So you know the obvious solution is to start closing your underperforming stores.

I thought the Portas review was a complete waste of time. I thought it was a dark publicity stunt by a government that seems addicted to getting TV personalities in to try and capture the public's imagination.

Some high streets, frankly, I think are beyond a tipping point and we've got to accept they're not going to come back. It is going to be a tough year on the high street.

What I think is interesting to watch is if any legislation comes out of the Portas review. There's a good chance that planning will be looked at again. There's a good chance that Councils will begin to see the benefits of converting spent High Streets into residential and I think really that's one of the only ways that you can avoid these areas becoming permanently blighted.

We're all going to get very excited about the Olympics, we've got European football, the Queen's Jubilee, but overall I think it's going to be a difficult year. And what finance directors are telling me is that they're cutting their cloth accordingly and they're making sure their costs are in line with expectations that sales are not going to grow significantly.

Some of the more financially geared companies, so companies with big borrowings have been struggling through the year, so some of those have already had big problems. I think some of those trends are going to continue through.

I'm not sure we are going to see a lot of corporate M&A, because it's very, very difficult to do an M&A acquisition if you're a corporate and the trading isn't very good and the profit is difficult, and the debt markets are tough.

2012 will be a hard year for retailers. But I think there are one or two silver linings that you can point to. For example, inflation is falling very, very rapidly, even before the year-on-year comparison with last year and the imposition of higher rate of VAT falls out of the comparator.

2012 is going to be tough, but the great thing about the retail sector is that it's constantly reinventing itself.