Simon Jones: 2024 wrapped

If I had to summarise optics in 2024 in a single word, I think it would be ‘lobbying’. The past 12 months had associations and retailers lobbying governments like they’ve never lobbied before. And with two bites at the Conservative and Labour cherries, you can’t really blame them.  

Work put in by the sector’s key stakeholders during 2023 started to pay off. In February, Labour’s shadow health secretary Karin Smyth told a conference that high street optometry practices would be ‘put to work’ under a Labour government, which at the time was still waiting for a general election to be called.