AGENDA
Meeting Economy Committee Date Wednesday 20 January 2021 Time 10.00 am Place Virtual Meeting Copies of the reports and any attachments may be found at www.london.gov.uk/mayor-assembly/london-assembly/economy
Most meetings of the London Assembly and its Committees are webcast live at www.london.gov.uk/about-us/london-assembly/youtube and/or www.london.gov.uk/media-centre/london-assembly where you can also view past meetings.
Members of the Committee Léonie Cooper AM (Chair) Susan Hall AM Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman) Murad Qureshi AM Unmesh Desai AM Caroline Russell AM
A meeting of the Committee has been called by the Chair of the Committee to deal with the business listed below. Ed Williams, Executive Director of Secretariat Tuesday 12 January 2021
[Note: This meeting has been called in accordance with the Local Authorities and Police and Crime Panels (Coronavirus) (Flexibility of Local Authority and Police and Crime Panel Meetings) (England and Wales) Regulations 2020. These regulations permit formal London Assembly meetings to be held on a virtual basis, with Assembly Members participating remotely, subject to certain conditions. The regulations apply notwithstanding any other legislation, current or pre-existing Standing Orders or any other rules of the Authority governing Assembly meetings, and remain valid until 7 May 2021. The meeting will be broadcast live via the web-link set out above. The regulations may be viewed here.]
Further Information If you have questions, would like further information about the meeting or require special facilities please contact: Lauren Harvey, Senior Committee Officer; Telephone: 020 7983 4383; Email: [email protected]
For media enquiries please contact: Aoife Nolan, External Communications Officer; Telephone: 020 7983 4067; Email: [email protected]. If you have any questions about individual items please contact the author whose details are at the end of the report.
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If you, or someone you know, needs a copy of the agenda, minutes or reports in large print or Braille, audio, or in another language, then please call us on 020 7983 4100 or email [email protected].
Certificate Number: FS 80233
Agenda Economy Committee Wednesday 20 January 2021
1 Apologies for Absence and Chair's Announcements
To receive any apologies for absence and any announcements from the Chair.
2 Declarations of Interests (Pages 1 - 4)
Report of the Executive Director of Secretariat Contact: Lauren Harvey, [email protected], 020 7983 4383
The Committee is recommended to:
(a) Note the list of offices held by Assembly Members, as set out in the table at Agenda Item 2, as disclosable pecuniary interests;
(b) Note the declaration by any Member(s) of any disclosable pecuniary interests in specific items listed on the agenda and the necessary action taken by the Member(s) regarding withdrawal following such declaration(s); and
(c) Note the declaration by any Member(s) of any other interests deemed to be relevant (including any interests arising from gifts and hospitality received which are not at the time of the meeting reflected on the Authority’s register of gifts and hospitality, and noting also the advice from the GLA’s Monitoring Officer set out at Agenda Item 2) and to note any necessary action taken by the Member(s) following such declaration(s).
3 Minutes (Pages 5 - 42)
The Committee is recommended to confirm the minutes of the meeting of the Committee held on 15 December 2020 to be signed by the Chair as a correct record.
4 Summary List of Actions (Pages 43 - 48)
Report of the Executive Director of Secretariat Contact: Lauren Harvey, [email protected], 020 7983 4383
The Committee is recommended to note the completed and outstanding actions arising from previous meetings of the Committee.
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5 Action Taken Under Delegated Authority (Pages 49 - 74)
Report of the Executive Director of Secretariat Contact: Lauren Harvey, [email protected], 020 7983 4383
The Committee is recommended to note the recent action taken by the Chair of the Economy Committee under delegated authority, in consultation with party Group Lead Members, namely to agree the Committee’s report, Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas Economy and COVID-19.
6 Models for Economic Recovery: Cooperatives and Universal Basic Income (Pages 75 - 76)
Report of the Executive Director of Secretariat Contact: Dan Tattersall, [email protected], 07783 805825
The Committee is recommended to: (a) Note the report as background to putting questions to invited guests on the role of cooperatives and universal basic income in London’s economic recovery from COVID-19, and note the subsequent discussion; and (b) Delegate authority to the Chair, in consultation with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output arising from the discussion.
7 Referred Motion (Pages 77 - 78)
Report of the Executive Director of Secretariat Contact: Lauren Harvey, [email protected], 020 7983 4383
The Committee is recommended to consider the motion referred to it by the London Assembly at its meeting on 5 November 2020.
8 Economy Committee Work Programme (Pages 79 - 80)
Report of the Executive Director of Secretariat Contact: Dan Tattersall, [email protected]; 07783 805825
The Committee is recommended to note its work programme for the remainder of the 2020/21 Assembly year.
9 Date of Next Meeting
The next meeting of the Committee is scheduled for Tuesday, 2 March 2020 at 10.00am.
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10 Any Other Business the Chair Considers Urgent
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This page is intentionally left blank Agenda Item 2
Subject: Declarations of Interests
Report to: Economy Committee
Report of: Executive Director of Secretariat Date: 20 January 2021
This report will be considered in public
1. Summary
1.1 This report sets out details of offices held by Assembly Members for noting as disclosable pecuniary interests and requires additional relevant declarations relating to disclosable pecuniary interests, and gifts and hospitality to be made.
2. Recommendations
2.1 That the list of offices held by Assembly Members, as set out in the table below, be noted as disclosable pecuniary interests1;
2.2 That the declaration by any Member(s) of any disclosable pecuniary interests in specific items listed on the agenda and the necessary action taken by the Member(s) regarding withdrawal following such declaration(s) be noted; and
2.3 That the declaration by any Member(s) of any other interests deemed to be relevant (including any interests arising from gifts and hospitality received which are not at the time of the meeting reflected on the Authority’s register of gifts and hospitality, and noting also the advice from the GLA’s Monitoring Officer set out at below) and any necessary action taken by the Member(s) following such declaration(s) be noted.
3. Issues for Consideration
3.1 Relevant offices held by Assembly Members are listed in the table overleaf:
1 The Monitoring Officer advises that: Paragraph 10 of the Code of Conduct will only preclude a Member from participating in any matter to be considered or being considered at, for example, a meeting of the Assembly, where the Member has a direct Disclosable Pecuniary Interest in that particular matter. The effect of this is that the ‘matter to be considered, or being considered’ must be about the Member’s interest. So, by way of example, if an Assembly Member is also a councillor of London Borough X, that Assembly Member will be precluded from participating in an Assembly meeting where the Assembly is to consider a matter about the Member’s role / employment as a councillor of London Borough X; the Member will not be precluded from participating in a meeting where the Assembly is to consider a matter about an activity or decision of London Borough X.
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Member Interest Tony Arbour AM Jennette Arnold OBE AM Gareth Bacon AM MP Member of Parliament, Orpington; Member, LB Bexley Shaun Bailey AM Siân Berry AM Member, LB Camden Andrew Boff AM Congress of Local and Regional Authorities (Council of Europe) Léonie Cooper AM Member, LB Wandsworth Unmesh Desai AM Tony Devenish AM Member, City of Westminster Andrew Dismore AM Len Duvall AM Florence Eshalomi AM MP Member of Parliament, Vauxhall Nicky Gavron AM Susan Hall AM Member, LB Harrow David Kurten AM Joanne McCartney AM Deputy Mayor Dr Alison Moore AM Member, LB Barnet Steve O’Connell AM Member, LB Croydon Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM Keith Prince AM Murad Qureshi AM Caroline Russell AM Member, LB Islington Dr Onkar Sahota AM Navin Shah AM Peter Whittle AM
[Note: LB - London Borough]
3.2 Paragraph 10 of the GLA’s Code of Conduct, which reflects the relevant provisions of the Localism Act 2011, provides that:
- where an Assembly Member has a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest in any matter to be considered or being considered or at
(i) a meeting of the Assembly and any of its committees or sub-committees; or
(ii) any formal meeting held by the Mayor in connection with the exercise of the Authority’s functions
- they must disclose that interest to the meeting (or, if it is a sensitive interest, disclose the fact that they have a sensitive interest to the meeting); and
- must not (i) participate, or participate any further, in any discussion of the matter at the meeting; or (ii) participate in any vote, or further vote, taken on the matter at the meeting
UNLESS
- they have obtained a dispensation from the GLA’s Monitoring Officer (in accordance with section 2 of the Procedure for registration and declarations of interests, gifts and hospitality – Appendix 5 to the Code).
3.3 Failure to comply with the above requirements, without reasonable excuse, is a criminal offence; as is knowingly or recklessly providing information about your interests that is false or misleading.
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3.4 In addition, the Monitoring Officer has advised Assembly Members to continue to apply the test that was previously applied to help determine whether a pecuniary / prejudicial interest was arising - namely, that Members rely on a reasonable estimation of whether a member of the public, with knowledge of the relevant facts, could, with justification, regard the matter as so significant that it would be likely to prejudice the Member’s judgement of the public interest.
3.5 Members should then exercise their judgement as to whether or not, in view of their interests and the interests of others close to them, they should participate in any given discussions and/or decisions business of within and by the GLA. It remains the responsibility of individual Members to make further declarations about their actual or apparent interests at formal meetings noting also that a Member’s failure to disclose relevant interest(s) has become a potential criminal offence.
3.6 Members are also required, where considering a matter which relates to or is likely to affect a person from whom they have received a gift or hospitality with an estimated value of at least £50 within the previous three years or from the date of election to the London Assembly, whichever is the later, to disclose the existence and nature of that interest at any meeting of the Authority which they attend at which that business is considered.
3.7 The obligation to declare any gift or hospitality at a meeting is discharged, subject to the proviso set out below, by registering gifts and hospitality received on the Authority’s on-line database. The on- line database may be viewed here: https://www.london.gov.uk/mayor-assembly/gifts-and-hospitality.
3.8 If any gift or hospitality received by a Member is not set out on the on-line database at the time of the meeting, and under consideration is a matter which relates to or is likely to affect a person from whom a Member has received a gift or hospitality with an estimated value of at least £50, Members are asked to disclose these at the meeting, either at the declarations of interest agenda item or when the interest becomes apparent.
3.9 It is for Members to decide, in light of the particular circumstances, whether their receipt of a gift or hospitality, could, on a reasonable estimation of a member of the public with knowledge of the relevant facts, with justification, be regarded as so significant that it would be likely to prejudice the Member’s judgement of the public interest. Where receipt of a gift or hospitality could be so regarded, the Member must exercise their judgement as to whether or not, they should participate in any given discussions and/or decisions business of within and by the GLA.
4. Legal Implications
4.1 The legal implications are as set out in the body of this report.
5. Financial Implications
5.1 There are no financial implications arising directly from this report.
Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985 List of Background Papers: None Contact Officer: Lauren Harvey, Senior Committee Officer Telephone: 020 7983 4383 E-mail: [email protected]
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Page 4 Agenda Item 3
MINUTES
Meeting: Economy Committee Date: Tuesday 15 December 2020 Time: 10.00 am Place: Virtual Meeting
Copies of the minutes may be found at: www.london.gov.uk/mayor-assembly/london-assembly/economy
Present:
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair) Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman) Susan Hall AM Murad Qureshi AM Caroline Russell AM Navin Shah AM
1 Apologies for Absence and Chair's Announcements (Item 1)
1.1 The Chair explained that in accordance with Government regulations, the meeting was being held on a virtual basis, with Assembly Members and guests participating remotely.
1.2 The Clerk read a roll-call of Assembly Members who were participating. Apologies for absence were received from Unmesh Desai AM, for whom Navin Shah AM attended as a substitute.
2 Declarations of Interests (Item 2)
2.1 The Committee received the report of the Executive Director of Secretariat.
2.2 Resolved:
That the list of offices held by Assembly Members, as set out in the table at Agenda Item 2, be noted as disclosable pecuniary interests.
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3 Minutes (Item 3)
3.1 Resolved:
That the minutes of the meeting held on 4 November 2020 be signed by the Chair as a correct record.
4 Summary List of Actions (Item 4)
4.1 The Committee received the report of the Executive Director of Secretariat.
4.2 Resolved:
That the completed and outstanding actions arising from previous meetings of the Committee, and additional correspondence sent and received, be noted.
5 The Changing Nature of Work After COVID-19 (Item 5)
5.1 The Committee received the report of the Executive Director of Secretariat as background to putting questions on the changing nature of work after COVID-19 to the following invited guests: Jules Pipe CBE, Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills; Patrick Dubeck, Head of Regeneration, Greater London Authority (GLA); Michele Pittini, Senior Economist, GLA; Jordan Cummings, Senior Associate Director & Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry; Rowena Howie, London Policy Chair, Federation of Small Businesses; Laura Davison, Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation; Michael Cracknell, Director, Deloitte Real Estate; and Sam Gurney, Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress.
5.2 A transcript of the discussion is attached at Appendix 1.
5.3 During the course of the discussion, the Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation, agreed to share a number of relevant reports with the Committee.
Page 6 Greater London Authority Economy Committee Tuesday 15 December 2020
5.4 The Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills agreed to: Provide information on whether any specific assessment had taken place on the potential for London to lose skill and talent as a result of young Londoners choosing to leave the city for cheaper accommodation; Confirm how many of London’s businesses were being helped by City Hall and whether that number had increased from 0.3% since 5 November 2020; Provide information on what the Mayor had done to encourage the GLA functional bodies to help support young people entering the job market, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Provide information on whether the Mayor’s housing policies and strategies had been reviewed in the light of the link between COVID-19 mortality and overcrowded living conditions.
5.5 Resolved:
(a) That the report and discussion be noted; and
(b) That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from the discussion.
6 Economy Committee Work Programme (Item 6)
6.1 The Committee received the report of the Executive Director of Secretariat.
6.2 Resolved:
That the work programme, as agreed by the Chair of the GLA Oversight Committee under delegated authority on 3 December 2020, be noted.
7 Date of Next Meeting (Item 7)
7.1 The date of the next virtual meeting of the Committee was confirmed as Wednesday, 20 January 2021 at 10.00am
8 Any Other Business the Chair Considers Urgent (Item 8)
8.1 There were no items of business that the Chair considered to be urgent.
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9 Close of Meeting
9.1 The meeting ended at 12.33pm.
Chair Date
Contact Officer: Lauren Harvey, Senior Committee Officer; Telephone: 020 7983 4383; Email: [email protected]
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Appendix 1
London Assembly Economy Committee – 15 December 2020
Transcript of Item 5 – The Changing Nature of Work After COVID-19
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you. That brings us on to the main item of our agenda today, which is the changing nature of work after COVID-19. Here we all are proving, it would be fair to say, that the nature of work has changed because normally we would all previously have been in the Chamber and today literally none of us are.
First of all, I would like to welcome our guests who have kindly tuned in to join us virtually this morning. I will start with Jules Pipe [CBE], who is the Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills. We are probably going to be talking mostly with Jules this morning about the skills part of his brief. You are very welcome, Jules.
We also have been joined this morning by Patrick Dubeck, who is the Head of Regeneration at the Greater London Authority (GLA); Michele Pittini, who is a Senior Economist at the GLA; and Jordan Cummings, who joins us from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), where he is the Senior Associate Director and Head of London Policy. You are very welcome, Jordan, this morning. We also have Rowena Howie with us this morning, who is the London Policy Chair from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). We also have Laura Davison, who is from the City of London Corporation, where she is the Director of Intelligence and Research. Last but very much not least - and we are going to be having some questions about the situation with buildings in London - we have Michael Cracknell, who is a Director from Deloitte Real Estate. You are very welcome, Michael. Thank you very much for being with us this morning. From 11.30am, we will be joined by Sam Gurney, who is the London Regional Secretary from the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
My first question is really one that I am going to direct to all of our guests, which is to get you all in the mood, I suppose, but also to get your thoughts. I will start with you, if I may, Jules. What in your view have been the key impacts of the pandemic on the use of commercial, retail and office space?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Thanks, Chair. There has been a huge and immediate impact in the way that we all operate our lives and you found that this morning working from home. That is a timely and apposite happening that demonstrates that the future working from home is “all going to be easy” and “this is the future” is perhaps somewhat questionable. I have said that to you before in this Committee.
The impacts are varied in the impacts they are having immediately now on the ground and they are even more varied as to the impacts that they will have on each different area in the future. A lot of that is driven by the fact that we were seeing dramatic changes in retail anyway. It would have happened over a longer time. But what we have seen happen over the last six to nine months has compressed what we almost certainly would have seen over the next five years with regard to retail.
Offices and that area of commercial are in a very different situation. Yes, there has been a dramatic change in usage and, yes, we have seen a downturn in lettings of offices, but that is related to the immediate usage. The activity elsewhere within the commercial office sector tells a different story. It tells one of a relatively optimistic market in terms of office space needed. The discussion now is about what type, not whether to build offices. It is about the kind of use that we will be making of it and so more shared space, more collaboration space, fewer rows and rows of desks but, where there is desk space, more space. There has been Page 9 a huge contraction in recent years in the amount of desk space per office staff member. Perhaps this is reversing that.
In the straight retail, I have rehearsed that, but the current usage of offices is having an impact on that. That will come back when we are beginning to use offices more in central London.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you. That was a really useful beginning. I am going to come to Michael Cracknell next and I wondered if there are things that you would like to add to Jules’s initial comments on the impacts of the pandemic on the use of commercial, retail and office space.
Michael Cracknell (Director, Deloitte Real Estate): Thank you. Good morning, all. I work at Deloitte. I head up and lead the London Office Crane Survey, which is a survey we do that looks at the volume of office space construction built across central London. We have been doing it for the last 24 years.
I agree with a lot of what Jules [Pipe CBE] said. In the last two quarters, quarter 2 and quarter 3 of this year [2020], we have seen a significant drop in leasing activity in the market. No doubt through the initial lockdown, people were just unavailable to go and visit offices in order to think about new space. At the moment, if you are an office occupier who has a lease expiry coming up, you are probably more worried about getting your people back to the office than moving and so you have probably been thinking about extending existing leases to give yourself some time to think and take a wait-and-see approach.
We have seen availability in the office market relatively low in the last few years, which is an encouraging sign, a comment that Jules [Pipe CBE] was making, really. The report got headlines this time because the number of new starts in the period was 50% down on previous, but in reality the number of new starts is above the long-term average. There was 2.6 million square feet of new starts started in central London in the period of the last survey, which was March through to September [2020], with a typical average of 2.4 million and so above that. We have seen construction delays. The construction sites have struggled with COVID. A number of sites are a quarter or two quarters delayed in bringing offices into the market and so completions have reduced.
In the last few years we have seen changes in terms of who is occupying the offices with the financial sector diminishing a little, but areas such as technology, media and telecoms (TMT) have seen massive growth. We are seeing this change in the occupier profile across central London. As Jules [Pipe CBE] said, going forward, we expect to see the use of the offices in a slightly different way. We described in our report this time a hybrid working practice where people work from home and from the office and recognised the challenges for organisations of addressing this potential new normal that we face.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): That was really interesting. I wonder if I could bring you in now, Laura, from your perspective. The impacts in your area - literally a geographical area - have been quite dramatic here. I wondered if you would like to add something as well from your perspective.
Laura Davison (Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation): Thank you. I absolutely agree as well with the suggestion that the immediate impacts are quite different from the longer term impacts that we will see because, for the City, the immediate impacts have been quite dramatic. Over 80% of our businesses are in financial professional business services and tech and they are industries that were already relatively used to working from home and have been able to work from home pretty successfully across this period. At the same time, our footfall has dropped dramatically, in some instances to 10% or less than what it would be normally, and that has had a huge impact on the businesses dependent on that footfall, particularly given what a low resident population we have. We have seen a pretty dramatic immediate impact. Page 10
Longer term, it is accelerating some of the trends that we have been talking to for the last few years with companies about the changing use of office spaces. As others have said, that push for having more collaborative spaces, more innovation spaces, consolidating under one roof, looking to bring other sorts of companies in, choosing how you co-locate with other companies that you can work with effectively. Most of the businesses that we are talking to, as Michael says, are looking to move to a more flexible model. This is not the wholesale death of the office at all. This is looking at how we reconfigure office space and how we make it work differently. In many ways, if we do potentially move to that more flexible model, in some instances location becomes even more important. The sort of things you will look for when you are choosing that location or locations will potentially become more important as you choose.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you. That adds something to what Michael [Cracknell] and Jules [Pipe CBE] were saying.
Michele, I wondered if you would like to come in with an economist’s overview here. Michael [Cracknell] was saying that in some ways things have been looking good and yet I was listening this morning and hearing that the largest number of people have just been made unemployed - shocking figures - between August and October [2020] I think the timeframe was. I wondered overall what your perspective is on where we are now and where we might be going to with offices and retail.
Michele Pittini (Head of Economics, Greater London Authority): Thank you. There is no doubt that we are going through an unprecedented economic crisis. It only takes a cursory look to the recent scenarios that we published for the London economy to see that we expect the situation, particularly in terms of employment, to get worse, unfortunately, in 2021 before it gets better.
I would definitely agree with some of the comments made by previous speakers about the fact that we just need to be a little bit cautious in projecting the current situation too far into the future. The reality is that there is a range of scenarios that are equally plausible and possible at the moment for the future of office work and indeed for the future of the city and how the economy of London will work, ranging from a return to something that looks more like business as usual - it will never be exactly like business as usual because of a number of changes in behaviours and in technology are likely to be entrenched but something that looks a little bit more like the previous business as usual - all the way to a remote revolution in which the importance of geography and location is significantly diminished. There is a whole range of scenarios, which we try to capture across the GLA group in a number of scenario projects that we take forward, including, for example, the Transport for London (TfL) scenarios for travel in London after COVID-19.
When you look at the attitudes of employers and indeed employees, having gone through this incredible forced experienced of nine months of remote working, there are some signs that indeed point to the fact that both employers and employees have experienced remote working on a large scale and can relate and appreciate some of the benefits that will come from it. There was a number that seems to come through from the latest survey and quite consistently in surveys in the United Kingdom (UK) and surveys in the United States (US), which is 70% of employees expect not to return to working a 9-to-5, five days a week, office work pattern, but expect to work at least for part of the time from home. Indeed, employers expect their employees will return to the office with that kind of pattern.
Again, it is not the death of the office and, as Indy Johar and Simon Pitkeathley put it in a recent OnLondon blog piece, a virtual workforce needs a place to land. It is really essential for remoting to come together to bond, to establish the social connection and common-think culture that allows them to perform. Therefore, the expectation is that office locations that are easily accessible at the centre of the city that allow for that sort Page 11 of interaction will remain important. You may not see rows and rows of desk. You may see many more meeting rooms, workshop rooms and informal spaces for team interaction and flexible work. In a sense, there was a trend among some of the more progressive businesses towards reshaping their spaces in that sense. Of course, there were some clear incentives to do so, also because of the cost of accommodation in London. Create space whereby you bring your employees together to work together, not to type in front of a computer, which they can do more cost-effectively, potentially, from a remote location or from some other office location that is not necessarily at the centre of the city.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): In some ways, I know that we have been touching on this issue about retail and saying that there was already a revolution going on in the high street. That one was a very visible one because you could see that shops were closing and new things were opening up. My perception - and this might just be the field that I have worked in - is that actually there has been a revolution going on in the office already for the last 15 or probably 20 years. A lot of people were moving over to reduce the amount of office accommodation that their businesses used and introducing touchdown points and hot desks all over the place. Actually, that is something we have had at the GLA. I have been working in offices where, even if I had a cellular office, I had to book my own office, as it were. Otherwise, if I just rocked it up and had not booked it, somebody else would be in there having a meeting and I would not be able to use it. This has massively accelerated that trend and you are quite right to point that out. Thank you for that, Michele. That was really helpful.
I wondered if I could ask you about the cost of making workplaces COVID-secure, especially in the light of the ever-changing guidance about what tier we are in, whether we are locked down, whether we should be working at home, whether we should be coming into work.
How much has that been costing businesses, would you say? Do you think that is going to be a bit of an impetus for people thinking about encouraging more of their staff to work at home and to have that remote working option because it has been so expensive to implement all these COVID-secure arrangements?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): Thanks, Chair, and good morning. I am delighted to be here.
It is a good question and, while I do not have the exact figure, it runs into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It is exacerbated by a few things, not least the supply chain shortage for all of that kit that businesses have needed for the last several months that everyone was after at the same time. There have been enormous supply pressures.
The other pressure I would list before I get to the effects of it is the fact that businesses were already in a holding pattern for stockpiling and everything related to 1 January [2021] and the B-word that we have not quite got to that is coming around the corner. There are businesses across London that have been in a holding pattern and stockpiling and getting ready and keeping those cash reserves on the side for when they might need them. Some of those cash reserves have had to go on making their offices COVID-secure or their premises COVID-secure. I would not underestimate the impact that has had on the balance sheets.
Then you are exactly right: if you are a business sitting there saying, “I have just spent £50,000 on kit that I never thought I would need for my business that I now do not even have to use because I am encouraged to keep people away from the office”, that probably stings a bit. Like the Mayor said on the news this morning, whatever we feel about the rules, we do need to follow them, but it does not take that bitter taste out of the mouth. There are a lot of businesses in London that are feeling that.
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On the behavioural elements related to that, people saying, “We have spent this and so we are going to encourage people back into the office”, we have not seen a huge amount of dissent from businesses saying, “We have spent this and we really want you in regardless”. There is still, broadly, good adherence to the rules. That being said, I can tell from my own experience of having popped into our office in Bank a couple of times a week since September [2020] that there are probably more people around the city centre than you might think with some of the harsher restrictions. Whether that is related to those offices being exceptionally well distanced and perhaps being some of the safest places in London or whether that is related to the advent of a vaccine and people’s confidence in going outside generally, it is hard to tell. One thing I would say is do not underestimate the cash that has been allocated from piles of cash that perhaps were not aimed at this but were aimed at another exogenous shock.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): I will bring you in in a second, Laura, because I can imagine you will want to talk about some of the things that Jordan has just touched on as well.
This is our last day in tier 2. What would you say that yesterday’s announcement, that at midnight tonight we are going into tier 3, is going to mean for the businesses that you represent, Jordan?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): It is going to be tough. There is no other way to cut it that is not tough. The hardest hit sectors are the ones that we have been speaking about for months: hospitality and leisure. If this is the golden quarter and if they need the revenue they get from December to tide them over until the spring, it looks very difficult for a lot of businesses to make it through to the spring. Under that scenario, regardless of party politics, whichever way you cut it, firms just need to stay alive. In those hardest hit sectors, we would like to see a bit more support.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): That was going to be my follow-up question. Do you feel that we have the support package from the Mayor and from the Government for businesses impacted by tier 3? Is it going to be enough to help people get through this Christmas period, which is really not a very golden quarter this year? In fact, we were just looking at the golden quarter at our last meeting in November [2020] and talking about it with people then. Do you think the packages are going to be enough to help people to survive?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): At this stage it is difficult to see how they can cover everyone. The Government did move at pace earlier in the year. We will give it credit for that. We do have an unprecedented amount of spend on things like the job retention scheme. Things like the local interruption loans could probably be beefed up. As a national organisation, we look at the impact in London and we look at the impact in other cities and we try to work with the Government on things that could be broad-based enough, but it is going to be quite critical for those acute sectors in London. More support, whether it is locally led or nationally led, would be welcomed by us.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): We wrote to the Chancellor [of the Exchequer, The Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP] previously after hearing from businesses and also from employees earlier on in the June, July and August [2020] period. We were talking about targeted sectoral support because, as a Committee, we felt that was important. Having listened to many people now, we would probably still go along with that.
I am going to bring in Laura because she is very keen to add to what you were saying. You have a concentration of businesses that were really impacted here. We had a session with Catherine McGuinness [Chair of the Policy and Resources Committee, City of London Corporation] as a Committee and we know that a lot of people have been doing a lot in the City to try to make their workplaces COVID-secure. How is it landing?
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Laura Davison (Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation): I absolutely wanted to expand on a couple of Jordan’s points. As you say, our City businesses have spent a lot of time, effort and money making workplaces COVID-secure, but when you are talking about bringing people back in, it is worth remembering that that also dramatically reduces capacity as well. If you make your offices COVID-secure, you cannot bring back in 100% of your workforce in any case. For most of the businesses we are talking to, it is maybe 20%, maybe 30%, maybe as high as 50% depending on their office configuration, but that inevitably in its own right will have a natural cap on how many people you can bring back in.
The other thing to point out is that we have been surveying City firms and individuals and it is not so much concerns about coming into the office that are holding individuals back. We are seeing huge concerns about public transport still enduring. In one of our recent surveys, 95% of people are most concerned about public transport, which for the whole of London is a huge issue. For the City, it is a massive issue because well over 80% of people come in from all over London and beyond through public transport.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Yes. There is more that we know about the virus as well, certainly things like getting into a lift with other people, which was a point that Assembly Member Russell made before. In a very large building, if you are putting one person in a lift, it is going to take a long time to get everybody up to the fiftieth floor. That would be quite a blow as well. Also, there are small spaces like toilet cubicles and things like that. As we learn more about it and we understand more about the droplet transmission, people are focusing on small spaces like being on the Tube, being on a bus, being in a lift and so on. That is absolutely true.
I wanted to ask Rowena what she thinks more sustained and permanent working from home since the pandemic means for the commercial and retail properties across London.
Rowena Howie (London Policy Chair, Federation of Small Businesses): To follow up on a few points already made, yes, it is going to be very difficult for small businesses across many different sectors and different industries coming up to 1 January [2021] and beyond. To follow up one of Jordan’s points on the cost of doing business, the rent quarter that is due next week is going to be very difficult for many small businesses to pay, particularly, as he was saying, hospitality and leisure and also retail and offices. It is incredibly difficult.
The point that I would make for going ahead to the future is about the relationship between landlord and tenant. We definitely see a very one-way relationship from talking to our members. The landlord supplies and you must pay. Really, we have been encouraging a little bit more dialogue. There has been a lot of conversation about moving over some retailers to turnover rents instead as just one idea. There are lots of different ways to change the dialogue.
It is about ways to create leverage and maybe encouraging a common best-practice approach, even if we started with encouraging that amongst the biggest landlords that then becomes something for other smaller landlords to look at. Somebody else mentioned co-locating with flexibility within leases to create new situations where we can help businesses survive and thrive. It would be a great shame, given the situation with funding at the moment or lack of funding at the moment or whatever is left, that so many businesses would go to the wall in the next few months simply because of that.
To add on to that, business rates relief is due to end in March [2021] and I would say that the extension of business rates relief is critical in terms of a requirement to keep businesses going in these toughest of times to give them leeway to find the ways forward for the future.
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Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): There are some really interesting points there.
I am going to pass over to my colleague Caroline Russell [AM] now, who is going to probably build on some of the points we were just making about unused office space or using office space in new ways and creative ways and perhaps sharing, as you just said.
Caroline Russell AM: We have been hearing a lot from everyone about how, although there will be fewer people in it, there is clearly still going to be an ongoing need for office space, even if it is used differently. This is a question about what is going to happen to the currently unused office spaces in London. Are we expecting to see a mass sell-off of the unused office space at some point in the near future or do you see something else happening?
Michael Cracknell (Director, Deloitte Real Estate): In terms of unused office space - and we talk about office availability - the amount of office availability across London has been very low over the last few years. If you compare it to the 2008/09 when we had the previous financial crisis, the availability of space was higher before it started and was much higher afterwards. We are starting from a good place. That is why there has been resilient leasing activity and vibrancy in the construction market.
Clearly, you are right, though, with respect to particularly the second-hand office space. What we would class as class A new-build office space is very low and probably continuing to be low, but it is inevitable that as organisations reach the end of lease expiries - and this is generally the point it will happen - many organisations are not in a position to necessarily exit space when they like. It is just too expensive. As people get to the end of a lease expiry, yes, we anticipate particularly organisations that may have a portfolio of space or of buildings to potentially withdraw from some of those. We do, therefore, see a greater level of second-hand space coming onto the market.
Caroline Russell AM: Is there a risk or a potential benefit, depending on which side of the relationship of landlord and tenant you sit? Could there be a collapse in rental or property and land values, do you think, relating to that? Do you think it is at that sort of scale?
Michael Cracknell (Director, Deloitte Real Estate): No. As I said, it is a relatively slow process because of the point around only having the ability to do it at the point of a lease expiry, generally. It gets stretched out anyway. We believe office demand will generally stay reasonably strong. Yes, we see an impact, but not a dramatic change, we would suggest.
Caroline Russell AM: On the point that Rowena [Howie] was raising about the relationship between landlord and tenant, do you think that the COVID shock, if you like, is going to push over into encouraging better practice between landlords and tenants and more support for those small businesses in particular?
Michael Cracknell (Director, Deloitte Real Estate): We think that the impact of COVID will drive what we have described as a flight to quality in terms of office space that is provided. If you are a landlord and you have vacant space, the way in which you make that space more attractive to tenants is to ensure that your space is COVID-friendly and has the right facilities within the building to help that process. We believe there is a general trend in the market to encourage environmental criteria and agenda and to improve offices for people more generally even before COVID. Now COVID has reinforced that situation. We see developers and landlords looking at how they can improve workspace environments to meet those requirements, absolutely.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Bringing in Jules [Pipe CBE] and possibly Patrick [Dubeck] - I am not sure how you want to split this off between you - what is your perspective on this issue of the currently unused Page 15 office space? Also, do you have views on how this vacated space should be being used as we move forward out of this particular moment?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I would only want to add what Michael [Cracknell] has said, not disagree with any of it. A lot of areas of London have seen huge pressure. Although what Michael said was the average across London, there are pockets where occupancy was very high and driving up rents before COVID impacted. We will see a return to that situation in some locations, particularly tech sectors and life sciences as well.
There is big pressure in the life sciences space. We are seeing a lot of clusters being brought forward in London, which is a version of office space. Some of them have some particular requirements about layout and technical kit in terms of air handling, fume covers and all that kind of thing and also floor loadings for technical equipment. It is a specialist section of office space, effectively, and they want to be clustered in spaces that we would often see office space such as King’s Cross and Euston. We will see continued growth in those kinds of sectors.
Also, the Government’s increasing introduction of permitted development rights (PDR) and changes that it would like to see in the London Plan or changes that it wants to bring in over the next three or four years and the changes to the approach to planning are all going to put quite a lot of pressure on what we used to know as B1(c), office space and light industrial space. An awful lot of that, again, looks like offices, B1(a), creative industries, recording industries. It involves a lot of desktop activity in a creative atmosphere with meeting space. That very kind of space is what is in danger of being lost under these different attacks, whether it be PDR or just the general pressure to flip commercial space into housing. This is another thing to factor in. It is not just about demand. It is also about the continued pressure that has created a loss of this kind of space.
Caroline Russell AM: Do you think there is anything that you can be doing that can actually protect that kind of space? This Committee has heard many times from organisations like the FSB and the people working in railway arches about the need for that kind of space. If you can see a pressure on those slightly more marginal spaces as all of this COVID stuff shakes out, is there anything you can do to protect those smaller businesses and make sure that they can access space affordably? That is what we heard from Rowena [Howie] just now. It is about that relationship between the landlord and the tenant and the need for that relationship to shift.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I will give very quickly three things. The first is very practical. What the Mayor is doing through TfL in terms of the arches that TfL owns and the approach that TfL has taken there with its arch businesses has compared favourably to others in that sector with the charter that exists between TfL and its tenants.
There is all the work that the GLA Regeneration team has been doing with the Good Growth agenda, which looks to encourage a polycentric city, and the promotion of mixed use in the way we approach localities across London.
Finally and ultimately, there is the way that - particularly that second thing, the Good Growth agenda - is expressed in the London Plan. The draft that we sent in now a year ago, as I am sure you will remember when it came to the Assembly, is very strong on the preservation and future creation of business space, particularly light industrial, B1(c), and also B1(a). As I say, there are a lot of creative industries that are more office space than a large dirty shed. What the Mayor is continuing to do is ensuring that those policies still remain sufficiently robust in the Plan and that although the Mayor does have this priority of getting homes built, it cannot be at the expense of places for people to work. Page 16
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. In September [2020] the Mayor announced he was doing some research looking at the future challenges and opportunities facing central London and Canary Wharf. What is that research hoping to achieve and who is being consulted and how will the results be disseminated and acted on?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): The project stems from a recognition that the ongoing success of the Central Activities Zone (CAZ) is absolutely essential not just for London but for the whole of the UK economy. The CAZ, the northern Isle of Dogs and that whole fringe that extends for half a mile or so around those central areas, is responsible for about half of London’s economic output and something like 13% of the whole of the national economic output. It is essential that that activity is able to be restored. There are huge challenges at the moment: a lack of commuters, a total lack of tourism, a lack of national visitors as well as international visitors. There is this agglomeration of economic activity that makes it work and also that makes it attractive. It is the fact that the City is so successful and people want to locate there from all around the world and the complex offer and ecosystem that London offers that places it as the number-one global city.
The analysis that we have commissioned from Arup is looking at the emerging trends across key sectors, looking at what the key functions are that make up the CAZ, looking at what relies on the existence of those central functions. The obvious things are all of those support things like last-minute printing, sandwich shops, drycleaners. It is the interrelationship between all these things. It is not going to look at the CAZ in isolation but will see how it fits with the whole of the London and national economy. It is going to look at scenarios because we do not have, sadly, a crystal ball. Really, it has to look at different scenarios so that we are ready, depending on the way things pan out. That is the broad thrust of it.
Caroline Russell AM: When are the results out? When is it going to be published? Will we start to see any action coming from it?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Patrick, can you help me on the timescale?
Patrick Dubeck (Head of Regeneration, Greater London Authority): Yes, I can jump in here. In fact, Michele might be well placed to comment because he is involved in working with the Arup team. The research is in two strands. One is an analysis of scenarios and trends and the second element is beginning to look at the policy levers we might have in London to affect the sorts of changes that the scenarios indicate may be coming. We are expecting a March [2021] delivery of the research. I do not know, Michele, if you are better placed to provide anything further on that.
Michele Pittini (Head of Economics, Greater London Authority): You have pretty much covered it. I would add in terms of stakeholders and involvement of external experts, clearly, the ultimate customer is the London Recovery Board, which is a partnership that goes beyond the GLA and goes beyond local government. It has people from business, academia and so on. Therefore, the recommendation will not just be a recommendation from the GLA. Presumably, there will be a number of actions for central Government, local government, business and so on.
Also, the research itself will be informed by a number of focus groups and workshops with businesses and external experts. Also, there is an independent expert panel that has been appointed to provide a steer on the project, which includes Greg Clark of the London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP); Yolande Barnes, Professor of Real Estate [University College London]; Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities; and
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Zubaida Haque, former Director of the Runnymede Trust. Hopefully, it is going to be a project that is very much open to external expertise and perspectives.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. I was just about to hand back to the Chair but I can see Laura has her hand up. Do you want to comment on this in particular?
Laura Davison (Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation): Yes. I would like to flag two pieces of research that we would be very keen to feed into this if at all possible. We have a major piece, London Recharged, working with Oliver Wyman [Forum] and Arup, which was published a few weeks ago. It looked very much, as you say, at that package of things that are necessary not just for recovery but for a really thriving future. At the end of the day, this is not just about COVID. It is about making sure we have the right business ecosystem, infrastructure, global openness, business environment, talent, quality of life, amenities, etc. We are now internally doing a piece looking at also what that means for the City. This is just to say that we would be very keen to feed in and share those insights.
Michele Pittini (Head of Economics, Greater London Authority): If I could come back quickly, London Recharged is already feeding into that because there was a set of consultants that did the study. By all means, send through anything that is relevant. Thank you.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Chair, I am handing back to you.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you for that, Caroline.
We are going to move on to some questions now from Shaun Bailey. He is going to start questioning probably with Rowena [Howie] and we will then move on to a number of other guests.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Good morning, all. Before I start, Laura, would it be possible to get a copy of that report? That sounds like something we would like to see. If you come through the Chair, I am sure she will disseminate that report. Thank you.
Secondly, good morning. I am going to address my first question to Rowena. In a way, I am asking a slightly obvious question. What will happen to those retail and hospitality businesses in central London locations that rely on office workers for most of their income?
Rowena Howie (London Policy Chair, Federation of Small Businesses): In all honesty, there is just going to be a lot of businesses failing. We are going to see an increase, even more than we have seen already, in January and February [2021]. Anecdotally from my own experience, I have a retail shop in central London. On our street, which has two large offices, the coffee shop has already closed down. You see that across different parts of London a lot.
However, it is not just about large offices feeding small businesses who are doing, say, daytime trading in cafés, coffee shops and stuff like that. The impact is much wider. Commuters and office workers do not just provide lunchtime sandwich retailers with business. They feed into a lot of other kinds of retail, too, and hospitality as well with after-work dining out, which London is famous for and so many of us have enjoyed. There is no doubt that hospitality and leisure is an industry that is hit much harder than many others.
Those who have struggled through the first lockdown have tried to adapt, have tried to reopen, as Jordan [Cummings] has said, and have spent a lot of money outlaying to manage the risk. They have taken avail of every possible grant that they can, but that is absolutely still not enough. Having missed out on a key trading Page 18 period through October, November and December [2020], which would have got them through paying their December quarterly rent and then got them through the quieter periods of January and February [2021] until the weather begins to change, that is simply not going to be there. Cashflow is absolutely critical in small businesses in January and February and that is one of the main reasons why you are going to see more fail in January and February than you may have done in the months preceding.
There is also Brexit to consider. There is also the fact that many companies have been hanging on. They have been trying their best in the expectation that this is going to be over at some point soon. Again and again, we have met cliff-edges and we have met new restrictions and harsher restrictions, which means it is becoming less viable commercially to do business. Also, small business owners are worn out. It is incredibly hard to keep a company going and to keep all your staff on and not make redundancies. Meanwhile, let us not forget that there has been no grant support for directors of companies, and so there is nothing to pay them to support them and their families while they are trying to keep their businesses going and all their staff in employment. There is a toll on small business owners, too, I would say.
All of that is coming together at a critical time when bounce-back loans may have run out and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) may have been earmarked for everything. It is going to be a really tough time and we are going to see a lot of businesses go to the wall. It is really important that we give them hope for a future recovery so that even if they are meeting the most terrible times in January and February that might make them consider throwing in the towel, there has to be hope for the future and something that they can move on to.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): OK. You are right. I have spoken to a number of small business owners and one of the things that comes up in the conversation is the personal toll of having to make these big decisions for their own families and other people’s families as well. It is a worry there.
I want to slightly modify the question. We have talked about a remote revolution. We have talked about the City looking significantly different. Is that weighing on the minds of small businesses, not knowing, even if we return to full trading, what that trading may look like? A lot of the conversation we have had this morning would suggest maybe a smaller footfall or at least a different footfall. Are small businesses in a position to even think about that at this time?
Rowena Howie (London Policy Chair, Federation of Small Businesses): Absolutely. Small businesses have been thinking about it for the last few years because we have been facing uncertainty with the question over Brexit for a number of years now. COVID has merely added to that.
I would say that small businesses are fantastic because they have that ability to be flexible and pivot and respond maybe much quicker and much more agilely than other larger organisations, but that can also give way to a certain amount of wheel-spinning in terms of scenario planning. It can be quite hard where they are expending energy trying to constantly think, as you are saying, Shaun, of what to do next, but in fact, as many other people today have already presented, we do not know what is going to happen in the future. We really do not know what the timeline is going to be. A lot of people are still focused on resilience right now rather than recovery for the future.
I will say that, in terms of recovery for the future, the main conversation that I have heard most recently is actually around childcare. There has been a lot of talk and a lot of looking at people’s quality of life just from the fact that you may not be commuting to work and you are working from home, for instance. As small businesses look to the future and if and when they return to an office space or what is happening with their retail shop or if they are relocating their business or light industry or manufacturing needing to extend a lease, Page 19 people are looking to the future. What they are concerned about are things like quality, affordable childcare because they need to be focused on their business and its recovery and its growth in the future, rather than worrying about where their children are and who is looking after them.
That really feeds into a much wider thing because, with COVID, there has been much more focus on local provision. There has been everything from shopping local to a focus on neighbourhoods, boroughs and everything else. I am going to add not just quality, affordable childcare but quality, affordable, local childcare. That cannot be underestimated in its importance to the future recovery. As such, we mentioned earlier the Mayor’s Recovery Board and now there is the COVID Business Board, which has produced a roadmap. Childcare is mentioned on that roadmap as a key item.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): OK. Thank you. Can I come to Jules on this question, please? Do London’s commercial centres, particularly the CAZ, need to be reimagined and repurposed? If so, what is the Mayor’s role in doing this? We have had lots of conversations this morning about a different way of working, a different use of office space, more flexible office space, co-location, all kinds of things. Does that also mean a redesign physically for the CAZ in particular and central London in general?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): In terms of public space, the phrase ‘redesign’ would be appropriate. That was perhaps something that was needed even without COVID. The City of London has been at the vanguard of pedestrianisation. We all know that the Mayor would very much like to have seen Oxford Street pedestrianised. That need is just as relevant today and in the future as it was a year ago to reimagine the use of the connecting space between buildings and to adapt to the new reasons why people might want to go to such a location and do their shopping. It is more about an experience now rather than simply bang, bang, bang, shop, shop, shop, in and out, carrying carrier bags of merchandise. That is not the way people want to behave anymore. There is a reimagining in that sense.
Perhaps for the actual buildings themselves it will be more gradual as people bring them on for redevelopment or, say, as John Lewis has decided, want to reduce the number of floors they have for retail space. That needs reimagining. Does it mean a separate lift around the back of a side street that goes up to the few floors above or is there something more bold or more subtle in the way that it introduces office space into that retail centre.
I would say this, wouldn’t I, as a major contributor to the London Plan on behalf of the Mayor, but it is all in there. I am quite often asked whether the London Plan needs revision before it has even been finally published. No, all of this is in there about these things that we need to bear in mind as we look at renewing space, whether it is connecting space or office space itself.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): OK. What are the Mayor’s short-term and long-term measures to enable positive recovery across the city? We have talked about something leading to the long term. What is a short-term effect? What is a short-term tactic that the Mayor can do right now?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): You have heard mention earlier of the roadmap and that is all about safe and full reopening of London’s economy over the next 12 months, but it is very hard to start the firing gun on that when we are in such a stop-start situation with the immediate effects of the pandemic.
That plan has four themes to it. There is a communications element, a public health element, business support and also consideration about the licensing, planning and enforcement issues. That looks across the whole piece of the short-term coming out of lockdown and the issues we have about coming in and out of tiers in the way that we are doing. It covers issues about what local government should be doing and national Page 20
Government. Then, in the medium term, it is looking at transition to the longer term. Again, there are many issues for all levels of government. There is quite an extensive list of 30 or 40 points that we think that national, regional and local government need to be taking into account over the next 12 months as we emerge from the tier 3 lockdown that we are in.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Thank you. Just a little tweak to that for the final question in this section. How will the London Recovery Board engage with Londoners to shape the city’s recovery? You have talked about the action plan and all the points on it, but we will recover from COVID-19. As a Londoner, how will you be having that conversation with me if I own a business, big or small, or just as a citizen in London? How is the Board communicating?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Business plays a significant role in the overarching Board’s recovery. To do it justice, I would need a PowerPoint slide with the interconnecting groups that operate on this. The short answer to your question would be that all the recovery missions are in place. There are nine recovery missions being put in place. The oversight of those has representatives from across civil society as well as business, whether it is faith groups, the voluntary and community sector and so on, all the people you would expect to be on such a pan-London body representing all sectors.
In turn, there has been consultation. There was a great deal of consultation on the missions, for example, that was undertaken. We could let you have the chapter and verse of the reach that that consultation had in informing the missions.
Patrick Dubeck (Head of Regeneration, Greater London Authority): Yes, you are right, Jules. Under the auspices of each of the missions, there is an incredible amount of engagement that either has happened, is happening or is planned. I am involved in the High Streets For All mission that forms part of the Recovery Board’s programme. We have a whole programme of activity lined up through Talk London. We have done engagement with every single London borough, which are in turn preparing their own more localised engagement strategies. You have heard, I am sure, on a number of occasions that the recovery programme is about harnessing the power of London’s local authorities as much as it is about using city government to try to effect some change. It is local authorities that can really engage their constituents and their citizens best, enabled by some strategic messaging from City Hall.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Thank you for that.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Patrick has mentioned High Streets For All there. We have concentrated quite a fair bit on the CAZ and related issues and we should not lose sight of the fact -- I know the Committee does not generally, but it would be remiss of me if I did not press the fact that there is an awful lot of focus as well going on about the reinvigoration of high streets across the whole of London, inner and outer, as well as this very big piece of work focusing on the CAZ.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Thanks.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): I need to say that Jules has just sent me a message to say that he needs to go at 11.15am because the Mayor is demanding his assistance at a meeting. May I say who it is with, Jules, so that people understand? It is with the Secretary of State. Jules has been with us since 10.00am and now has to go at 11.15am. We will accept it because it is the Mayor and the Secretary of State. We would rather you stayed with us but we understand we have been gazumped.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I do apologise, Chair. Page 21
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): We do understand.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Apology accepted.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Your apology, yes, is accepted.
Navin Shah AM: Jules, you are absolutely right. You mentioned outer London and talked about high streets. Quite rightly, we are discussing the situation with the CAZ but, like you said, outer London town centres, local district centres, etc, were already taking quite a deal of hammering before the COVID pandemic. We have to make sure that the focus is also there and all efforts are made to see how the town centres and local district centres in outer London are also looked at in terms of reinvention or repurposing them. That is why I want to know what specific work is being done to revive and reinvent those areas that need a lot of support, particularly given the pandemic situation, and how the way of working and living itself is changing.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): You are absolutely right. It is changing and was changing before COVID. As I say, I am a firm believer that the plan does not need altering because it was very much in favour of creating mixed developments that do offer workspace as well as residential accommodation above. For all industrial sites apart from heavy industry, particularly those B1(c) types of site behind high streets, the plan is very much focused on not losing the employment space on the ground floor but building a couple of storeys or so above and more if the location can bear it. The long-term planning framework, I believe, is in place to help high streets.
More immediately, as part of the recovery, I mentioned this high streets mission, which I am sure Patrick [Dubeck] can expand on. The ambition is to help every single borough develop an exemplar scheme, one that will demonstrate more widely to the borough about the possibility. We are well positioned on this. Before COVID, we had been working on what was called the adaptive high streets strategy, which was the exact opposite of one size fits all. It was about how the GLA could help boroughs, help high streets, help Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and so on to look at pivoting their high streets into a new offer for the future. COVID has simply made the work acute as well as chronic. The high streets mission is a crisis extension of that, a call to arms to crack on and do what we wanted to do anyway about the reinvigoration of high streets.
As I said, as retail decreases, then we need to be more imaginative about the spaces that exist there. Patrick [Dubeck], you can build on that?
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Sorry, Jules and Navin as well. I am sorry to not bring Patrick in but, if we have you for only another five minutes, Jules, I do not want to hear from Patrick right now. We can hear from him just after you have gone. Sorry, Navin. There are some questions that Shaun has next.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Jules, in the interests of time, I am going to conflate a few things together and you can just give us an overall statement.
This is really focused on whether Londoners and London’s businesses want to stay in London. That is the general feeling of what I am asking here. Of course there is some research that will say that lots of people, businesses as well, are relocating out of London as a result of the pandemic and other commercial pressures and just the sheer cost of running a business in London.
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What will the Mayor do to ensure that London remains attractive so that we can keep our competitiveness? Are we at risk of a brain drain in London? I know I have asked you a number of things there, Jules, and so please pick out the ones that jump out to you the most.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Wow. That is a lot in one place. There are surveys and things that suggest a figure of around 90% plus of businesses suggest that they intend to stay in London. Single figures say that they are contemplating moving. That is still hugely serious. If someone said two years ago that 10% of London’s businesses would go out of business or leave London, that would be a serious issue. I am not making light of it but that is probably about the size of it.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Concentrate on this for me, then, Jules. What can we do to make sure that London remains attractive? We have a number of challenges coming with the pandemic, etc.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Rather than try to list all the things that the Mayor is doing - we touched on some of those and the recovery plan and everything - the essence of your question is about its attractiveness. It will always continue to be an attractive, leading, number-one, world-class city. When you look at its legal system, its language, its education system, the concentration of leading higher-education institutions. When you look at the number of planning applications, the very high level we are continuing to get for hotels and for student accommodation would indicate that certainly international investors see London continuing to be an absolute world-leading centre for people to come to, whether it is to visit, whether it is to come here for three years and be a student. That probably goes to your brain drain issue as well. I would not expect that at all.
In the long term, we have every reason to be confident. London has been here thousands of years. It has suffered huge issues, whether they be disease, war or whatever, in the past. I am absolutely confident and the Mayor is confident that we will bounce back. However, the work to be done is ensuring that we bounce back better than we did before and we do not make the same mistakes as we have done before in the way that we work and the way that we lay things out. We should try to take advantage of the situation to - it is becoming a bit of a hackneyed phrase now - build back better.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): I am conscious, Jules, that we have probably come to the end of the time when we can keep you. Shaun, there are still a few points at the end of the briefing as well that we were planning. We have a series of questions that we put together, Jules, as you will appreciate. If we write to you afterwards.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I was going to suggest that. Please do. Anything on the regeneration and recovery mission, I am sure Patrick [Dubeck] is more than capable than I am of answering it. On the skills side, by all means, on anything, do write. Take it as an opportunity to write and I will come back to the Committee.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you. We will pester Patrick [Dubeck] and Michele [Pittini] for some answers ongoing as well, but thank you very much. I am sorry you have to rush away but I hope it is a successful meeting.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I am sorry, too. Thank you for the Committee’s understanding. Thank you.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): Chair, you could let Navin [Shah AM] come back if he wants.
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Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Yes, I was going to say that I cut you off in your prime, Navin, but if you would like to come back in, perhaps we can bring in Patrick. Did you grasp the point that Navin was just doing his questioning on, Patrick, or do you want him to restate it?
Navin Shah AM: Chair, in order for Patrick to give me a full response to what else I was going to ask Jules, it is sticking to outer London areas specifically. Do not forget that apart from the plight of the town and district centres, you also have issues about the vision of Opportunity and Intensification Areas. Do you reckon that in the light of where we are, there is a need to have a rethink, reimagination and re-evaluation of the Opportunity Areas as well as Intensification Areas? Those are about major regeneration in outer London areas but are impacting on the whole of London as such. I would like reply on that as well.
Specifically, what is being done to encourage local shopping? I know that councils are doing that, but how can the GLA and how can the Mayor assist to promote local shopping and the revival of those high streets?
Patrick Dubeck (Head of Regeneration, Greater London Authority): There are a few things there. If I return to the broader high street question, there is an incredible amount of work that is going on at the minute. We have identified a range of things that we could really start to motor on to address some of the economic restructuring that is now happening at more breakneck speed than it might have happened without the impact of the pandemic.
There is a big question around data. We know that lots of our local places need better access to data. What we have heard loud and clear from local authorities during the pandemic is that access to and understanding about where vacancy rates are, what the trends are in their occupancy, what their footfall data looks like and how people are moving around their town centres and their places is now much more important than it ever was. We at the GLA are working on a project to look at how we can collectively access some of that data and make it available to local authorities to provide better insights that then inform policy decisions.
Elsewhere within the policy framework space, Jules touched on some of the planning conditions. The London Plan sets the framework within which we think lots of positive things can happen in town centres and high streets. There are some things on the horizon that cause concern. PDR causes big concern for London but particularly for our high streets because what we can see is the eroding of commercial uses without the planning authority having the ability to take a view. The latest consultation on PDR provides even greater concern. There are particular conditions in London where you know that the use class that is going to have the highest value in most places is going to be residential ahead of other things.
You made a point, Navin, about Opportunity Area Planning Frameworks (OAPFs) and whether there is a need for reconsideration. There are now 43, I believe. They are all very different. If you look at OAPFs, some of them are big swathes of area like the Upper Lee Valley. Others are tightly defined bits of CAZ in some places like around Euston or around Victoria. There are different answers in every context.
We are doing a piece of work across all the spatial development functions within the GLA family to look at what level of involvement we have and what we might need to have. We know that, for instance, in places where the development and regeneration of an area is contingent on a big bit of infrastructure kit - like Crossrail 2, the Bakerloo line extension - we know now that the ability to deliver those infrastructure schemes is going to be even more challenging than it was previously because of the plight of TfL’s funding model and the ability that London is going to have to attract infrastructure investment. It is going to be more challenging than perhaps it had been previously.
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There is a job to do to review some of the Opportunity Areas and look at whether the prospects of them developing in the way we envisaged now changes in light of the new circumstances. By and large, the frameworks as Jules has set out in terms of the plan and in terms of the OAPFs themselves provide the scope for different flexibilities and different scenarios to play out.
I think there might have been a third element to your question. I am not sure if you feel that covers everything.
Navin Shah AM: I am content with that. Chair, can I very briefly see if Rowena [Howie] would like to respond in terms of the plight of small businesses in outer London areas and what her organisation’s position is in terms of how those small and medium businesses can be supported, given where we are, in outer London?
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): I know, but we have discussed this in a couple of previous meetings. I do not like to cut you off in your prime but, Navin, I know you are here as a substitute for Unmesh [Desai AM] and we have discussed this before. What we were hoping to focus on next was the area of relocation away from London rather than talking about the issues relating to the CAZ and the outer London issues again, which we have explored in some detail in a previous meeting that you were not with us for.
I am afraid I am going to go back to Shaun Bailey now and we are going to go back to the issue of relocation, keeping London attractive, the brain drain and that whole area. Sorry to cut you off now, Navin, but we are going to go back to Shaun. Otherwise, we are never going to finish the areas that we have agreed to cover today.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): I address this to Laura [Davison]. Are you concerned about London’s businesses leaving the capital for other parts of the country due to COVID-19? There has been a lot of talk about that. Is that talk well founded?
Laura Davison (Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation): You are right that location decisions are absolutely critical given the current context both in terms of London and also looking at the global picture as well. It is not just London and the rest of the UK but London and other European centres and other global centres as well in terms of, at the business level, why have a workplace and why have it in London and of course, at the individual level, why choose to come to London, live in London and work in London.
It is worth saying that we are starting of course from a very strong starting point. London is consistently ranked as one of the best places to do business, to live and to work. Making sure that we retain those strengths is critical.
We have not at the moment seen businesses making large decisions. Given your focus on workspace at the moment, most of the businesses we have been talking about - given the level of uncertainty around COVID - have been doing things that are more flexible, perhaps looking at reconfiguration of spaces, looking at perhaps extending leases a little bit, giving them a bit more time and space to think about it. We certainly have not seen a mass migration.
Some of the effects of COVID are yet to come through. For example, business deaths have been very low across the year but are now starting to get much higher as Government support measures get phased out. We have not seen anything that looks like a mass outflow at the moment.
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That does not of course mean we can be complacent and so we are doing a lot of work, as I say, through London Recharged, through some London benchmarking work we are doing and through the City Recovery Taskforce to make sure that we can keep that breadth of offer that brings people here. On the personal side, there is the freedom of movement, the openness, the amenities, the quality of life. For businesses, there is the workplace but there is also the wider business environment, the regulatory environment, the legal environment, the sorts of things that make here a really good place to do business.
I am very happy to either expand on any of those or pick them up with you perhaps subsequently.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): I have one small question because I am trying to aid the Chair with time. Are we attracting any new business? Other financial hubs around the world are having their issues. Are we attracting any new business?
Laura Davison (Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation): As you say, it is interesting because we are of course not the only people facing these issues. We have seen perhaps far fewer businesses leaving than we might have expected and far fewer workers leaving than we might have expected, for example, due to Brexit. We have just started to see an uptake in business births. We are suddenly seeing new businesses start up after quite a long period of that being below normal levels for the year. We are quite optimistic in terms of the businesses we have been talking to. Despite the very challenging times, we are seeing new businesses come in and start up again.
Shaun Bailey AM (Deputy Chairman): OK. Thank you.
Caroline Russell AM: I am also interested in whether Jordan Cummings has anything to say on those questions that Shaun was just asking to get your position on the businesses leaving the capital for other parts of the country. Is that something you are concerned about?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): We would echo pretty much everything that Laura [Davison] said. It was said earlier that if it is one in ten that does not seem like a lot but a trickle can become a flood quicker than we think. We should not rest on our laurels in terms of London’s position.
We did some research to get some stats in November [2020] and the majority of businesses we polled in partnership with Ipsos said that they were planning to stay in their current offices or near to their current offices. We are not looking at a flood immediately.
One interesting thing to consider is the role of property and housing and the impact that has not just on the workforce but subsequently on management because they are looking at this more than they probably ever have before, I would say, at Board level. From some of our real estate members we have seen growth in inner-city housing and apartments where there is no need for a commute and then outer-city housing where you can have more space and a garden. Everything in that middle band, which is exceptionally expensive but perhaps also requires a commute, has seen a bit of a dip. The changes in residential movement are quite interesting to us as well.
One thing that I would just say - and I know we are coming on to this section - is that London as a major global city will have issues. We can solve them individually but when we group them together - whether it is housing, transport, costs, the legal environment that Laura [Davison] mentioned, changes in regulation, Brexit, crime perhaps - as an international investor, sometimes it looks worse than perhaps when we would look at them individually. Think about London’s issues in the round from an investor’s perspective and look at Page 26 whether or not this is the best place to set up. We have not seen that mass exodus in the same way, as Laura said.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Yes, back to Laura [Davison], Shaun [Bailey AM] has already touched on the concerns about London businesses leaving the City and setting up in other parts of Europe due to Brexit mainly but also due to the COVID crisis. Also, do you think that there could be a fundamental shift away from the City, partly as other parts of London develop their business districts? Are you worried at all that the City of London might no longer be the absolute financial and business hub of London?
Laura Davison (Director of Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation): When we look at the questions of why have an office, why come to a workplace and why come to a location, we have talked to businesses large and small a lot about this. Why come to the City? Why locate in the Square Mile? What is driving their location decisions? A lot of the factors that underpin those are not going to become less important as a result of the changes and they might become more important.
You have the connectivity and the ability to bring large numbers of people in. Of course, that is partly your workforce, given what a huge catchment area London and the City have for its workers and talent, but also bringing in investors, clients, people in similar fields and colleagues from overseas. That has taken a hit as a result of COVID, but there is no suggestion that you will not want to see people, interact and have those face-to-face meetings. That is part of the clustering, the connectivity, the creativity and the collaboration that comes from bringing people together. The sheer density and the agglomeration that the City has as one of the densest business districts in the world has always been seen by the people who locate here as hugely important in terms of that knowledge transfer, the access to all sorts of different firms, business, the Bank of England and regulators, the ability to talk and to interact and to communicate regularly.
Then there are the amenities. That is important wherever you locate across London. We have seen an increased focus over the last few years from businesses that do want to create high-quality work environments for their staff, which, as other people have said, means that shift away from rows of desks to more collaborative spaces on offer within the office and also local to you. That network of small businesses makes this so important and having access to cafés, to gyms, to restaurants, to transport hubs and to the things that allow people to have a quality of life in and around work as well. The City is not the only place that offers those. There are plenty of good clusters within London that do. We do not think those strengths are going to go away.
We are also increasingly focused, as many of you know, on aspects that will make the City a more pleasant place to come into, as some have commented around the sustainability and the quality of the environment we are offering.
Caroline Russell AM: Yes. I have certainly been very impressed by the new work you are doing on freight delivery and getting everything done either on foot or by bike. That is really making a difference in terms of the street environment for people coming in. Michael, did you want to come in on this point?
Michael Cracknell (Director, Deloitte Real Estate): Thank you. In terms of the City and looking at our report, for years now the amount of development in the City outstrips anywhere else in the rest of London. It is the area where you can build tall, where you can put sizeable developments. We have seen on the back of financial services seeking to save money in the last few years a small decline in the amount of construction, but ironically the reason why our report was suggesting that it had gone down 50% this year is because in the last period we have had two speculative massive schemes start in the City, which was a massive vote for the City. On top of that the City was seen as doing - as it did when we see Canary Wharf - is reinventing itself in terms Page 27 of the organisations that the City is able to attract. Yes, of course it remains the heart of the financial district but it also now attracts - when you think about the fringes of the City in particular - the travel and tourism (T&T) type organisations.
One further thing in terms of London versus the rest of the world, there was a Deloitte report a year or two back looking at London that showed that London was massively attractive compared to any other European centre in terms of secondary headquarters and that type of thing. The growth of T&T has allowed London to be a really significant place for fintech, which is the link between the financial services and technology. Nowhere else in the world can you go and talk to your T&T clients and also talk to your financial clients in the same city. You cannot do that in America because it is on two different sides of the area. Therefore, London retains some of this special status in terms of having that attraction for new and evolving businesses that are perhaps taking the place of some of the more traditional ones.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Chair, I will hand back to you at that point.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you very much. We are moving on to some questions from Assembly Member Susan Hall now. I am really pleased to tell the Committee and also Susan - because one of her questions I know she was hoping to put to Jules [Pipe CBE] - that Jules has been able to rejoin us.
Susan Hall AM: Thank you. That is good news for us all, thank you. In the meantime, Michael, going on from what you were just saying to Caroline’s previous questions, it is good to know that any businesses going are being replaced by those other businesses. What actions need to be taken to mitigate businesses planning to leave London, both by the Government and the Mayor, to ensure that London’s global competitiveness carries on in the future?
Michael Cracknell (Director, Deloitte Real Estate): We have seen some of the financial sector reorganise itself and this is about finding lower-cost bases to work - outsourcing, off-sourcing - so some of the larger financial institutions have moved to some of our regional sectors for some of their back office type facilities. In a sense it is almost the success of London; it is a finite space, organisations respond to that and put the most significant operations in the centre of London and as they grow they move some of their other operations out. In general I think the success of London has pushed some of this evolution that naturally occurs, which is perhaps not a terrible thing. Even if we talk about now going forward in terms of if we all spend less time per week in the office and spend two days at home, or whatever the new normal works out to be, ultimately that will release space back into the market and allow more businesses to have London as their home. That will take a little time but that is quite a positive story going forward.
Susan Hall AM: It is indeed. Jules, if I can bring you in please? Jules, what specific assessment has there been on the possibility of many young Londoners choosing to leave London, primarily of course for cheaper accommodation, and the potential for London to lose a great deal of skill and talent?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I am afraid I will have to get back to the Committee on that one, any specific research. That has not come under me at all so I have not been aware of that, but we can find that out and write to the Committee.
Susan Hall AM: That is great. Thank you, I will be grateful. Jules, also in The Financial Times on 23 November [2020] there was an article exploring whether or not increased working from home could lead to companies potentially offshoring some of their operations, thus also potentially causing unemployment in the UK. Do you get any sense there may be a problem in London regarding this?
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Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No, it is not a threat that has been raised with us so far. A lot of other things have, the consequences of homeworking. Clearly there are tax implications for people working abroad, the people undertaking it on a casual basis that we have anecdotally heard about, so there are certain barriers to it happening. Obviously, work is ongoing on the effects of homeworking, not just the implications for office space but obviously issues around mental health as well. There is a myriad of things that we do need to be monitoring as we go forward.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, we do. How has the Mayor engaged with businesses and organisations affected by the pandemic?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): This is one of those ones again where I need to say I would need to refer to a very complex and colourful PowerPoint slide with all the different tiers engaged in recovery and the mechanisms they have used to engage with communities, the voluntary sector, civil society and business. Business is very heavily involved, and business representatives and their organisations are heavily involved in the work.
Susan Hall AM: On 5 November [2020] your colleague, Rajesh Agrawal [Deputy Mayor for Business] indicated to me in an Assembly Plenary meeting that City Hall was only helping approximately 0.3% of London’s businesses. Can you please assure me today that this number has improved over the past six weeks and can you find out for me what the latest number is?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I am happy to write to the Committee on that.
Susan Hall AM: Do you think it has improved since then?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): The reason I pause and struggle with that is because I do not think the 0.3% was necessarily a representative figure. There are many different ways of engaging with businesses, some of them harder to measure than others. It is much harder to track who has accessed supply of information and how widely it is disseminated. It is far harder to track than simply face-to-face interactions and the recording of face-to-face interactions. I do not know what 0.3% was referring to.
Susan Hall AM: It was figures that Rajesh [Agrawal] was giving us at the time. Rajesh also told us in June [2020] that the Mayor’s Economic Recovery Strategy was, “on the top of our minds” and that is a quote. However, it still has not been published. Do you know when that will be?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I presume that was a reference to the recovery strategy that I referred to earlier, which has been drawn up by the LEAP and published.
Susan Hall AM: It has now been published, when was that published?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): LEAP was last week, so I think it was probably last week.
Susan Hall AM: OK, I will certainly read that with interest if it is what we are referring to.
The Mayor has also spoken out about the damaging impact of this pandemic on the West End and other central parts of London. Indeed he recently said that the pandemic had created a potential - I can never say Page 29 this word - existential threat to central London. Do you think his decision to relocate City Hall away from the centre of the city to Zone 3 is inconsistent with his apparent desire to support central London?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No. The Mayor has said the move would obviously be supportive of regeneration in the Docks area. The Royal Docks obviously is a focus of London’s regeneration in the same way that locating City Hall - albeit next to a very fine and famous landmark in the form of Tower Bridge - was not in a central London business district at the time. It has now become one around London Bridge, but at the time it was located there it was not. It is using it as a catalyst for regeneration rather than simply keeping it located in a central - either political, civic or business - zone.
Susan Hall AM: You do not think that central London is crying out for a confidence boost at this moment? I would say it was, you are saying it is not?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No, we absolutely need to be rallying to the cause of London, within London and both nationally and internationally. However, I would hope that rallying cry would be broader than simply about the physical location of City Hall.
Susan Hall AM: I think there are many of us that disagree but I will leave it there. Thank you, Chairman.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you very much for that, Susan [Hall AM]. Some interesting points there about the impact of City Hall on confidence and on the central London experience.
I am going to pass back to Assembly Member Caroline Russell now. Caroline is going to ask some questions. We have been joined by Sam Gurney as well, so we have everyone you need to be able to address your questions present on the call. Jules, because you have come back to us, we do have some more questions for you a bit later as well so we will come back to you. Thank you very much for coming back.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. These questions are about the impact on Londoners of working remotely, particularly the impact on employees. To Sam Gurney and also to Jordan Cummings, perhaps to Sam first, what is the impact of working remotely for Londoners and how does remote working affect relationships amongst colleagues?
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): Thanks, Chair and Caroline. I have been listening with great interest to the rest of the discussion this morning because obviously from a TUC point of view we have huge interest in all of the other issues you have been discussing, and I sit on the Recovery Board so I have been involved in quite a lot of that work so far.
Caroline, on your specific question, obviously there are big implications from the increase in homeworking. We have long been supporters at the TUC of increased genuine flexibility, enabling people to work at home. There are obviously different categories of that - we have occasional homeworkers, regular homeworkers and permanent homeworkers - and there are different things that apply to all of those. We have seen a steady increase up to the pandemic in the number of people who have been working at least some of the time at home, but obviously that has massively escalated. I think it is GLA figures that show the capital has the highest percentage of jobs that are potentially doable from home, we have about 50% plus of the workforce who could do some or all of their work from home.
In terms of what that means, you have some very basic stuff around the conditions for people working at home and, as you say, it throws up issues. I will come back to the keeping in touch bit. There is staying safe, there are obviously health-and-safety implications from working at home, just as there are in any other workplace. Page 30
As we are seeing this increase in homeworking over the pandemic, there are issues around what employers need to do to make sure they are carrying out risk assessments for their staff. That is that people have proper equipment and people have proper connectivity at home, which feeds into the recovery plan and mission on digital access in London. Do people know what is expected of them if they are working at home? That is the whole issue around hours. I suspect you may all be finding this as well in terms of working hours once you are working at home - speaking on a personal note - the hours I am doing seem to have mushroomed because people think you are always available, so constantly being on back-to-back Zoom calls and others is vast. There is the whole issue around what is expected and what your hours are. Then there is the point you just made about staying in touch, around how management lines work if you are a homeworker.
That feeds into a lot of our concerns around the equalities agenda and the potential negative implications of some of that for staff not being seen to be around so you can then favour people. You get into a whole series of issues around that, which are really important. That is not at all trying to undermine the fact that, as I said, we think there are lots of positives potentially on homeworking but there are negatives as well that we need to look at very carefully.
There is a lot of guidance that unions have been putting out pre and during the pandemic to staff around what they should expect, and to management around how you negotiate that. We have seen some good practice examples and we have seen some of the high-tech companies that have put in place structures that are creating time for their managers to genuinely manage homeworking, because it does take more time and has different responsibilities. We have also seen some really poor examples as well.
If we have time I would like to come back to the equalities impact that we are seeing.
Caroline Russell AM: We will come on to that in a moment. First of all, perhaps if could bring Jordan [Cummings] in at this point. From the CBI perspective, what have you seen as the impact of working remotely for employees and what have you seen in terms of relationships between colleagues as well?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): It is a good question. There are a few things here, some Sam has touched on and we are delighted our friends at the TUC have done some fantastic guidance and we try to stay close to them on that. It is fair to say that there is good and bad practice and the CBI stands ready to weed out the bad.
There are probably three main ones, and then two additional ones. There is potentially a growing mental health crisis among some businesses. The way in which you manage that remotely, if we carry on going that way, is also very tricky. The balance point that Sam mentioned, about work-life balance, and not really knowing when people are switching off is very difficult. If you are switched off you do not know what your team is doing. The impact of siloed working and then the creation of a two-tiered workforce is something that has come up quite a lot. Lots of people working from home and some people thinking they would like to go back into the office, then a few members of the management team manage to see them in the office and sometimes it is quite easy to create those two tiers. Finally, the point that came up earlier around informal networks and having places for them to land. They are fantastic and very easy to do, and it is fantastically easy to set up a Zoom call, but maintaining them is quite difficult. We saw the fatigue on pub quizzes, which I am sure we all tried to join earlier in the year, which ran out quite fast.
When you group all of those together there are four or five pretty chunky things for employers to have to manage. We have seen a real mix of the ways in which they manage them. Sometimes businesses have had long-existing strategies around working from home, checking in and really, really rigid middle management practices, which is where some of this falls down quite a lot of time. Some businesses really, genuinely have Page 31 had no idea how to manage these all at once. I think a lot of the time in businesses you can do some things really, really well in sections, you try to tackle one well this year and then next year you work on the next one, but a lot of these have come at the same time. Therefore, there has been bit of a mix in terms of how businesses have managed them. From our experience we have seen some pretty good practice but there is probably still quite a way to go.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Back to Sam [Gurney]. You mentioned equalities. I was wondering if remote working has affected employees with disabilities and whether there is further thinking and support required in this area.
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): Absolutely it has. Obviously, there is a large number of disabled workers who were working from home pre-pandemic and that has increased, particularly given the additional vulnerability we have seen with the death rate for disabled people rising substantially under COVID. There are, again, some advantages to working at home but there can be some real disadvantages.
Again, one of the key things we always stress is that the Equalities Act provisions on reasonable adjustment apply to people working at home just as much as they do to people working in any other kind of work location. Reasonable adjustments do need to be made by employers at home, and that obviously at the moment includes things like increased provision for support for people who are doing video and phone conferencing with all sorts of issues around people having access to captioning and to the other resources they need to be able to take part in meetings like this effectively if they are working from home. There are issues that are now coming through the system around how the Furlough Scheme has been applied and employers that have been saying they do not think the additional cost of adjustments for people at home are reasonable. They have therefore been potentially putting more disabled workers on furlough than other workers, so there could be implications from that and we may see that playing out in the tribunal system because people may be bringing disability discrimination claims around that, so very important there.
This feeds into all workers, the point Jordan [Cummings] was making around isolation. There are concerns, certainly from our disabled members’ network in the region, more disabled members are being told they should be working from home than others. That does increase a sense of isolation and sometimes a sense of not being in contact with colleagues, and the mental health issues that apply to everyone. Yes, there are very important issues there. We have some good blogs up on the TUC website on this and some clear guidance on that.
The other issue to touch on is that there are far wider equalities issues as well; class and gender as well disability. As I said, we think in London over 50% of jobs can be done potentially at home but obviously that leaves a lot of jobs that cannot. Michael [Cracknell] touched on this before in one of his answers, there is a real danger of a two-tier workforce in the sense that even before the pandemic if you are a homeworker you are much more likely to be a white male in a managerial position. They were the people who were able to work at home and who were choosing to work at home. There is a danger you have white-collar jobs - working at home, decent conditions, good set-up and you can do that - and another layer where you get hollowed out and see other decent jobs leaving the capital because people can go and do those in other places. We get left with one tier of good and very well-paid jobs at the top and then your outsourced insecure work in various sectors left below. We are very worried that we might see that panning out as well and that needs to be watched very closely.
We have already made the really important point around quality, affordable childcare. Homeworking, if it is done properly, can be good for being able to support all workers with caring responsibilities but it can also be Page 32 used as cover for people being told, “You work at home. You can pick up your kids, then you can work in the evening and then you can do this.” That is a real danger if we do not have that quality childcare in London that we are seeing real threats to as well. There are big issues around that.
In terms of ethnicity, we had a big release yesterday on this and the triple whammy hitting black workers in the capital. One of the interesting issues there is that black workers are far less likely to be working at home. We think that is reflected as well in some of the disproportionate impact of COVID on workers, people are much more likely to be in jobs where they cannot work at home or to be told by managers they are not allowed to work at home. There are issues there that came up in our Dying on the Job report around differential treatment of people when they are asking to work at home. Again, it is something we would be very interested in the GLA looking at research on what is happening there in London.
Caroline Russell AM: You mentioned the issue of class. I think if you are living in overcrowded conditions, trying to work at home and you have children off school and whatever, then that is a much, much tougher situation than someone who has a space where they close the door and work at a desk.
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): That is absolutely right. Chair, if I might, homeowners are 73% more likely to work at home - that was pre the pandemic - than renters. As I said, we are finding again and again - I am sure you all have colleagues who are in shared housing or who have families and just do not have space, team members who are working on the kitchen table rather than having a desk - there are huge implications there for people, not just people who cannot work at home because their jobs cannot be done at home but people who potentially could but just do not have the space or the facilities. Again, that comes back to what employers can provide. It also comes back to the point that was made in the earlier discussion on housing prices in London and the danger that we might see some of those jobs going outside of London because people will be going, “If I can work at home I can afford to rent something considerably bigger if I move out of London and still do my job in London”. That does have implications for the future of the workforce in London.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. Finally, you touched on best practice. What best practice have you seen from organisations with regards to working remotely, both on productivity and also supporting employees’ wellbeing and are there any examples you can give us? Jordan, I will come to you with that one, you did touch on some examples but if you want to come in on that afterwards as well.
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): I do not have concrete examples to hand, I was trying to find some before this hearing.
We would stress the point around where workplaces are unionised, lots of unions have quite good agreements in place. UNISON, our largest public sector union, has some very good homeworking guidance that talks around negotiating agreements with local authorities. We know there are local authorities that have done that. I would like to be able to give you an example from outside of London. Bristol City Council has an excellent homeworking policy that was developed long before the pandemic but which involves lots of this stuff. We are anecdotally hearing on the tech side of companies that we might not think are particularly good in some other aspects of their employee relations but that have been good on this angle. Some of the big firms, like Google, are clearly making time for their managers to manage homeworking and have put that in, and are doing some of the things that Jordan [Cummings] said around proper guidance, “When you are having team meetings make sure you build in time for social interaction as well, the sort of stuff you do in the office if you were talking to your team where you do not just stick to business”. There is anecdotal evidence of lots of that stuff being developed.
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One of things we were going to highlight was in terms of GLA’s research function, collecting some of that information would be good. Also looking at how the Good Work Standard could be evolved to take some of this into account - I have not gone back and looked at the Mayoral Good Work Standard to see if some of this stuff is in there - also trying to gather perhaps some good examples from the companies that have signed up to that about what they are doing. That would then champion the Good Work Standard and also champion some of that good practice that we are fairly certain is out there. However, as I said, I would like to be able to say, “Companies X, Y and Z have done this” but I do not have that information to hand. Jordan [Cummings] might though.
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): Similar to Sam [Gurney], a lot of it is anecdotal. From what we have seen from the people who have large inner city workforces - professional services, consultants and legal firms in and around the city - one of the main things they have had good feedback from the workforce on is the role of leadership. That is not just at the top but in the middle, the middle bit is really important and I will come back to it. At the top it is the role of leadership in saying, “We know there has been this big exogenous shock to the workforce. We know you are anxious. We are going to do this definitely, regardless of what the restrictions say.” I think things like legal firms turning around and saying, in an industry that is very reliant on person-to-person paperwork-type transaction work, “We expect around 50% of the work to be remote regardless of what happens in the tiers, regardless of when we come out of the pandemic and regardless of how long the recovery takes” is a role of leadership. At the top setting out what we expect of our employees and what we are going to do for them regardless of what happens politically.
In the middle management section, recognising that they are also leaders in terms of training provision. One of the good things about the pandemic with people working from home is that unfortunately while it does fill up your diary you can take on quite a lot of additional training. You can register things remotely. While the person to person is not as good there is no restriction on your ability to do that, if you can fit it into the diary. The quality of making some of this employee expectation stuff work at middle management level relies on more of a heavy band of training I think in that section. It is recognition that the top level of leadership in the organisation is going to do X and recognition that middle leadership in the organisation is going to do Y combined have shown that there has been a good reaction from the workforce.
Caroline Russell AM: Thank you. All of this opens up the complexity of it for small and microbusinesses that are struggling with remote working but without those bigger management structures in place that either help or hinder everyone to get on with their work.
Chair, I will hand back to you now, thank you.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Assembly Members, we need to pick up the pace a bit because it is 12pm and there are a few people who did indicate in advance they would like to try to finish around about 12.30pm because they have other things they need to go off and do, and I am sure that might apply to some of our guests.
Susan Hall AM: Jordan [Cummings], if I can start with you, do you think employers are equipped to adapt to these new ways of working in the long run and is additional support required from the Government or the Mayor? Is there any sense of whether or not London’s broadband coverage is great enough to support continued levels of working from home? We can certainly prove that at times it does not seem to be.
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): Thanks, Susan. I think the latter point has been answered by the fact I dropped off for about 20 seconds earlier. Page 34
On the broadband rollout point, it is something the CBI has been working quite closely with central Government on for quite some time, not just rural. We underestimate the fact that in parts of the city of London the density does not allow you to have the megabyte speed you need sometimes even to run a video call, so let us not take for granted the density impact.
On the long-term adaptation, some of it will come down to cost and I think, as Caroline said, if you are a small business there are natural limitations on what you can give your workforce. I think having an honest conversation with firms that cannot afford it in the short term is really, really important so that they do not feel chastised for not being able to do so. Where you do have resource, I think clarity is important. What we have seen in members is instead of saying, “There may be a budget here. It is a bit opaque, you can claim it if you do X, Y and Z” you have more success with your workforce by saying, “There is a fixed budget. Here is what you can claim and here is the timeframe in which you can claim it.” Most people, if they have to work from home, will probably max that out and that is fine because then it is within the parameter. I think clarity from businesses in terms of what they are giving their workforce and how quickly they can give it to them is really, really important.
I do think over the long term it is going to depend on the balance sheet. If we are looking at a really tough January, February and March [2021] and more people have to work from home, if you are a small or medium-sized business you just might not have the cash. I think then there could be some kind of exemption and there might be more tax relief. Many businesses can claim that quite a lot as it is but perhaps there is more we could look at there.
Susan Hall AM: Fine, thank you. Do you think this will have an impact on wages going forwards?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): As an offset measure if we give people more stuff from home we expect them to be paid less in that sense, is that what you mean?
Susan Hall AM: Do you think it will have an impact on productivity? When we started people were quite enthused and I think many people are very wary and weary of what is going on now and therefore productivity is hit. Do you think that will trickle down into wages being hit by it as well?
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): It is a good question. I do not think it is impossible. There is bit of a lead-in time for that kind of decision at Board level I would say. I think if you are a Board sitting there looking at productivity this year you are going to recognise that even if it spiked there could be some volatile reasons for that, like we said earlier with no work-life balance and people having to work all hours. I think people need a bit more time probably to assess what is really going on in the workforce, so I would not say that we are going to be looking at a mass reduction in wages. As people suddenly have worked out that it is quite stressful to work from home, I think there is bit of a longer lead-in time than that. I do not know, Sam [Gurney] probably has some more on-the-ground examples of where people have been a bit more acute in those conversations.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, I am coming to Sam next. The problem is for the very small businesses, if productivity slows down they cannot look too much to the future because of their cash flow.
If I can ask the next question to Sam [Gurney], does the Good Work Standard need to be updated in light of people now working extensively from home?
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Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): I think it is well worth having another look at it. I could not say whether it absolutely needs to be updated but I certainly think it could be reviewed with a view to looking at the present. As I remember from when we were looking at its development, there is some good stuff in there. I think it is probably more the guidance that goes alongside it, in terms of issues like access to training, access to support and workforce engagement. They are things where looking at what businesses are doing on those things may now be slightly different if a larger percentage of people are going to be working at home going forward. I think it could definitely do with the team that is looking at that having a look at the guidance that goes alongside it, with a view to making sure that it is in line and if there are any gaps that need to be looked at.
Susan [Hall AM], if I could very quickly, on your other question I think the point around employers being equipped with that is really important. That is specifically, for instance, on things like disabled workers where it is making sure that employers know that they can access the Access to Work funding for provision of equipment at home and making reasonable adjustments. It is things like making sure that is up on the business hub at the GLA and making sure that guidance is there. I think it is, but again it would be worth checking that.
Your point on broadband is critical, and again it does come under the Digital Access Mission. It is not just the issue around whether we have adequate coverage, it is also the issue around whether people have the kit and the knowledge and skills to be able to use it and work from home. I know we have all very quickly had to pick up on using Teams and Zoom etc. You can imagine if you are a worker who has been not used to working at home, if you have been retrained or redeployed to do a job where you work at home and have never had to deal with digital skills then that is going to be really important. That comes under a number of bits of recovery missions, both skills academy stuff and the access to digital bit.
On the wages, I think it is a really interesting question. We are coming at it from a slightly different position. I think a lot of the evidence shows at the moment homeworker productivity is up. There are obviously cost savings in having large numbers of your staff working at home - if people are long term not going to be having to buy or rent extra office accommodation etc, not paying as much on bills for energy if people are working at home and using their own broadband etc - so there are issues there. We are negotiating where we have recognition for making sure that workers who are working at home get recompensed for some of those expenses. There are tax implications. You can obviously claim back some issues for homeworking stuff but I think people are very unclear what that is. As that pans out over the coming months we are going to need to look at that but obviously everyone is very focused at the moment on immediate pandemic stuff. As I said, we would expect we are coming out of this with a larger number of people working at home and there are going to be implications there for all different sizes of business, but I absolutely take your point that for smaller businesses and microbusinesses it is difficult and there are some different issues they are facing.
Susan Hall AM: There certainly are. Thank you. My next question will be to Jules [Pipe CBE], please. How will remote working impact young people entering the job market and what can the Mayor do to support young people newly entering the job market?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Picking up on what some of the other speakers have said, removing the informal networks that office activity provides probably has the greatest impact on young people than for any employees. White-collar apprenticeships, for example, I cannot fathom how they can effectively work from a wholly-homebased work environment. We would have to factor that in if there was any significant move to homeworking, I think what we have heard today is that it is very premature to make assumptions about a mass move to a permanent homebased environment.
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As for what the Mayor is doing, a lot of the work he is doing is through the use of the Adult Education Budget (AEB) and the adaptations we have made to the funding regime for that. We think it can play a critical role in supporting Londoners aged 19 or up, both those with youth qualifications or those who are facing perhaps long-term unemployment in retraining, reskilling, upskilling to access new job opportunities. There is a number of changes we have made, both to enable colleges to better provide courses in the current environment and also to increase the ease of access by young people.
Susan Hall AM: What is the Mayor doing to encourage the GLA functional bodies to help support young people entering the job market, particularly during the pandemic? We know those under 25 have been twice as likely to lose their jobs.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I could write to the Committee. As far as the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), TfL and the Metropolitan Police Service, I am not aware of what they have been specifically doing. Rather than me trying to second guess it would be more useful for the Committee if I wrote to you on that.
Susan Hall AM: OK, just to say are you aware the London Fire Brigade has effectively scrapped two apprenticeship schemes in their draft budget while creating two positions that cost over £100,000 each?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): No, I am sorry. With the breadth of my portfolio I do not keep up to speed with that kind of detail with the Fire Brigade I am afraid.
Susan Hall AM: You are now up to speed with that particular issue. I will let a colleague ask the next question.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Yes, thank you very much. We are going to move on shortly to Murad [Qureshi AM].
I wondered, Jules, if I could ask you a question. Does the Mayor have any view at all of whether or not we should have some sort of standard four-day week so that everybody moved on to a four-day week? Is that something that would both potentially help with bringing young people into the job market and also might help in terms of flexible and remote working? Obviously some people could then be doing compressed hours, compressing into four days. I suspect some people are doing 60 hours at the moment. There might be some implications there as you could spread out people’s days into different parts of the week, so that might help with office cost expenses. However, it may not be something that has come up as a discussion point yet to address all of those issues.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): It is not something that has been discussed with me. Those kinds of issues are all part and parcel of the discussion about productivity. There are huge question marks, as people have already raised, about how genuine is some of the boost that we have seen in productivity in certain sectors during COVID that - as I think some of your speakers have said - has been the result of people working astonishingly long hours, back-to-back Zoom meetings if their jobs involve a lot of face-to-face interaction or simply being at the other end of a laptop from 8am till 8pm. Simply sweating people for longer hours is not the same as increased productivity, as I am sure the Economy Committee knows.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): We have Sam Gurney from the TUC here, so I think he would be pretty angry if we did not agree with that and I can see Shaun [Bailey AM] was nodding vigorously. I know a couple of people working in human resources (HR) who have been doing ten-hour days because there have been a lot of Page 37 redundancies they have been involved in assisting with. It is pretty brutal for the people being made redundant but if you are working those extended hours it is not good for your health, physical or mental.
Thanks for that, Jules [Pipe AM]. That was just an interjection from me. I am going to bring in Assembly Member Murad Qureshi now who is going to ask some further questions and then we will come back to Susan [Hall AM] for a final wrap up.
Murad Qureshi AM: I am going to ask a question about the AEB, I will probably start with Jules before I go to Sam [Gurney] and Jordan [Cummings]. What are the Mayor’s plans going forward for the AEB with regard to supporting these new ways of working that we have been discussing for the last 20 minutes?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): The principal changes at the moment have been to enable adult education across the board to actually happen. Obviously we were faced with it completely grinding to a halt at the very time when it can be so valuable in helping people to retrain and find work, whether for the first time aged 19-plus or whether older and facing redundancy. There has been a whole range of interventions with the sector to enable people to take advantage of that retraining.
I get the sense your question was more about the specific courses perhaps.
Murad Qureshi AM: Yes.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): We are looking at particular sector-based interventions for those areas in particular that are facing shortages, in the creative and cultural industries, in social care, digital and also green industries as well. As it relates to the AEB, we would be looking to encourage the further education (FE) sector to pivot towards those particular industrial sectors and social care.
Murad Qureshi AM: That is interesting. I, myself, am thinking of doing a coding course but I am not sure whether that is going to help me or not.
Sam [Gurney], what do you think needs to be done in the adult education programme to help people make these adjustments that clearly we are having to make both in employment and outside of employment?
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): Thanks, Murad. One of the good things about having the devolved AEB in London is that it does give us some freedom and autonomy to look at priorities. Some of the stuff that has already been happening is the fact that in London people can access courses for free if they are on or below the London Living Wage. That is really important and is going to be very important - I do not use the term low skilled because most of our jobs are actually skilled but are termed low skilled - for low-paid workers to be able to access that, particularly people who are going to be affected where there are closures. Continuing to use the AEB to do that is going to be very important.
I sit on the LEAP and the LEAP obviously has the capital funding support for FE, so making sure our colleges have the infrastructure to deliver these courses is important. Jules touched on it and my next meeting after this, funnily enough, is with colleagues in the skills team at City Hall to look at the skills academies that are being considered, building on the model of the Mayor’s Construction Academy. It is not a physical building, it is bringing together stuff in key sectors. Jules outlined the initial areas that we are looking at there, which will be supporting green jobs, jobs in the digital sector, help for social care and creative and leisure industries. Those are areas that are either much needed or are going to be hugely affected by the pandemic. They are also often areas where there are considerable decent work deficits. Page 38
One of our key points is that we need to use our education budget to make sure we are skilling people up to fill vacancies or move into new jobs that need to be created in London, but what we are not doing is skilling people up to send them into bad-quality jobs. Therefore, it needs to run alongside the other work that City Hall, unions and employers are doing on quality jobs and creating those new jobs that are going to fill some of the gaps where we know there are going to be permanent changes in the labour market. The AEB is going to be really important in helping people to reskill.
If I could, Chair - sorry, I know we are short of time - we are just at the moment engaged in some very intensive discussions with the Government on the Union Learning Fund (ULF), which is a small but very important budget of £12 million that funds workplace learning, employers and unions working together. Two hundred thousand people go through those basic programmes in the workplace every year. The Government announced, with no notice, a month ago that it was going to end that funding from April next year [2021]. We are, as I said, in some discussions at the moment. We are hoping that we will be able to come up with new funding to meet that gap from central Government. We know we have lots of support from different bits of central Government on that, with discussions with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the [HM] Treasury at the moment on that. If that does not happen then we will be, or are already, talking to City Hall around where there may be potential to use bits of the AEB in London to specifically target workplace learning to make sure that gaps that are lost by losing the Union Learning Fund can be filled.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Murad, I hope your other guests are not going to also be putting in bids.
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): Sorry, Chair.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): The point is not for people to put in bids for what you would like it to be spent on. That was as very cheeky moment there from Sam Gurney of the TUC.
Sam Gurney (Regional Secretary, Trades Union Congress): Workplace learning from any source; workplace learning from any source.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Restrain yourselves. Back to Murad [Qureshi AM] and his questions.
Murad Qureshi AM: Jordan [Cummings], what does business want from the adult training programme? Do they have a role to play in making online training available? Undoubtedly that will improve productivity at home as much as when people do come into the office.
Jordan Cummings (Head of London Policy, Confederation of British Industry): Yes, it is a good point. I think, to be honest, business has a huge role to play. Earlier in the year some of our large recruitment members took it on themselves to invest in their online training platform that they put out in their supply chain and to clients for free. Therefore, it can be done. I think we are starting on a journey of big businesses with the resource and foresight, an ability to scan the horizon, being able to do these things and actually doing them and stepping up. That is fantastic and we are encouraged to see it.
To the point Sam made on the AEB, with only £300 million it is only going to spread so far so there is still going to be quite a big role for central Government to play in this. Some of the things we have been talking about for the last few months are that we have called for the Apprenticeship Levy to be changed to a flexible skills levy for some time; using Jobcentres to become training centres as well, these are hubs in communities where people should go and be trained as well as just signposted to existing jobs; and then some flexibility
Page 39 around getting people to invest in their own learning, I know that is difficult for some but there is the introduction of new flexible loan entitlements so working on how that works for individuals.
The final point I would say is there is a lot of talk about retrofit at the moment and these big green-job opportunities that I guess we can have in London, we are talking about tens of thousands of roles. However, I think more attention needs to be paid to the transferrable skills you would get from that job. The GLA has put a lot of great work into this No Wrong Door approach, which is fantastic, but it is articulating to the people who might want to step into these roles what they lead to eventually. At the moment it feels like we are just talking about this kind of wartime effort to get these retrofit jobs up and running, but where are they going to go afterwards? I think that is what we are focusing a bit more on.
Murad Qureshi AM: Thank you for that, Jordan. A lot of people do not have the gear as well. You will be surprised to know that a fair amount of the population does not have access to computers at home so we should not lose sight of that.
Can I end this area of question, back to Jules [Pipe CBE]? The Mayor allocated £6 million to Skills for London as part of the COVID Response Fund that was launched in May [2020]. Has that been successful in your mind and what can we expect in the future?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Which fund was that because there have been numerous funds? There is the COVID-19 Response Fund.
Murad Qureshi AM: I have been told this is a £6 million fund allocated to Skills for London COVID-19 Response Fund.
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): It is £11 million. That has been provided to AEB providers, FE colleges and other independent providers, specifically to expand their online provision. Obviously many, many colleges were set up to do face-to-face interaction in rooms, in their buildings. Therefore we acted quickly to enable them to both gear up their tutors to be able to do online supervision and online delivery of seminars and so on as well as make sure that both they and their learners were equipped, those who you rightly said were at risk of digital exclusion. Often the figures that quote the numbers of people who have access to being online at home refer to smartphones, which is really inadequate. That is whether it is a child at school to do their homework or someone attending FE college using their mum or dad’s smartphone, whether it is for essays or to research the internet or whatever. That was the core use of the £11 million.
There has been a variety of other interventions; fully funding Level 3 qualifications, equivalent to A-level, any courses that are Level 3 that last a year or less and any Londoner who is unemployed or at risk of unemployment can take advantage of that; you heard Sam [Gurney] mention the funding up to London Living Wage level for people to take advantage of courses; and increasing the rate as well of courses to attract and retain good staff within colleges.
I think one of the most crucial things we have done is introduce the 10% flexibility in budgets that AEB providers hold. Rather than quite a tight prescription on what courses it can be used for, we have loosened that to 10% of their budget. It has really been strongly welcomed by colleges to enable them to do these short sharp interactions that can perhaps get people back into work quickly. That can range from very basic job readiness interventions or perhaps something digital, something that is a small thing that perhaps someone lacks on an otherwise sufficient curriculum vitae (CV) that could get them into work. It is allowing colleges to adapt and be nimble and take action on that, which previously they have not. They have been quite Page 40 hidebound on national rules as to how they can use the money. They still have to account for it at the end of the day but being in flight, in the year of delivery, they are able to be more nimble and intervene as they need to.
Murad Qureshi AM: I can see this area growing as an issue of concern and the way of dealing with the new world upon us. I will hand back to Susan Hall [AM] who is finishing the questioning in this area.
Susan Hall AM: Thank you very much. I will bring in Rowena at this point and concentrate on the smaller businesses. Rowena, what more could the Mayor do to support employers and employees to manage the transition to remote working?
Rowena Howie (London Policy Chair, Federation of Small Businesses): We have just been talking about skills and training there. I think for small businesses digital skills is of key importance, upskilling existing employees and also - there was mention earlier when Jordan was talking about leadership roles - both senior management and middle management. As small businesses move beyond resilience and into recovery and are trying to grow, I think that becomes of prime importance in terms of setting up a business at the very beginning that is going to thrive, is going to treat its employees well, is well organised and has the resources necessary to thrive. Specifically in the digital skills regard, I do think that many small businesses are not as well equipped as you might think. Even levels of basic training would be welcomed, building upon the further specialist knowledge and needs that are there. Yes, skills and training I think are definitely really important to that.
Susan Hall AM: Thank you. Jules [Pipe AM], a couple of quick ones for you and then I am finished. Lockdown has given many people a greater appreciation for space and continued working-from-home arrangements have meant that many want more space to do their jobs effectively. Do you think the Mayor’s propensity to focus his housing strategies on very small units could potentially lead to even more Londoners choosing to leave the city because they cannot get the space they need?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): I think the London Plan does the opposite, it encourages space standards that we often do not see outside of London. The question of bedroom numbers is something different. The London Plan does not specify additional bedrooms and would not specify additional bedrooms for use as office space. What it seeks to do is achieve sufficient space for our day-to-day activities in the other habitable rooms. If the London Plan guidance is followed what we build today would have a greater propensity to be able to be used for a degree of homeworking.
Susan Hall AM: The Assembly itself has called on the Mayor to review all his housing policies and strategies in light of the link between COVID-19 mortality and overcrowded living conditions. Do you know if the Mayor is intending to undertake this review? If so, would you not agree it could potentially be advantageous to addressing some of the challenges of working from home?
Jules Pipe CBE (Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills): Yes, the Mayor will always keep all the policies under review. I will check with the Deputy Mayor for Housing if there is anything specifically being undertaken. Obviously, the Mayor would always be prepared to alter policies if it was going to achieve a better outcome.
In terms of size of units, the size of homes prescribed in the London Plan, as I say there are specific size requirements on overall size of homes. It does allow boroughs to set specific bedroom-mix requirements as well in the social sector.
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Susan Hall AM: We will have to agree to differ on that one, Jules [Pipe CBE]. Thank you anyway.
Léonie Cooper AM (Chair): Thank you. Assembly Member Hall has just brought our questions to an end. I want to thank our expert guests who joined us today; Rowena Howie from the Federation of Small Businesses, Jordan Cummings from the CBI, Michael Cracknell from Deloitte, we have had Sam Gurney from the TUC, Laura Davison from the City of London and they are no longer on screen but Jules Pipe and his two colleagues, Michele Pittini and also Patrick Dubeck. Thank you. I can see Caroline is actually clapping. Thank you very much.
We have had a very high-quality set of answers from guests today and it has been very useful for our deliberations in our series of meetings where we have been looking at the impact of COVID on businesses, on workers and on the high street in the lead up to Christmas. We did that meeting before we even knew that Tier 3 was going to happen, and that has been really helpful. We know we have asked you to look into your crystal balls in one sense and try to figure out the use of retail, commercial and office space going into the future and how we all will be working, but thank you for working with us on that.
Page 42 Agenda Item 4
Subject: Summary List of Actions
Report to: Economy Committee
Report of: Executive Director of Secretariat Date: 20 January 2021
This report will be considered in public
1. Summary
1.1 This report sets out details of actions arising from previous meetings of the Economy Committee.
2. Recommendation
2.1 That the Committee notes the completed and outstanding actions arising from previous meetings of the Committee.
Actions Arising from the Committee meeting on 15 December 2020
Minute Topic Status For Action Item
5. The Changing Nature of Work After COVID-19
During the course of the discussion, the Director of Completed. Intelligence and Research, City of London Corporation, Attached at agreed to share a number of relevant reports with the Appendix 1. Committee.
The Deputy Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills In progress. A Deputy Mayor for agreed to: request for this Planning, information Regeneration and Provide information on whether any specific assessment was made on Skills. had taken place on the potential for London to lose skill 23 December and talent as a result of young Londoners choosing to 2020. leave the city for cheaper accommodation;
Confirm how many of London’s businesses were being helped by City Hall and whether that number had increased from 0.3% since 5 November 2020;
Provide information on what the Mayor had done to encourage the GLA functional bodies to help support young people entering the job market, particularly
during the COVID-19 pandemic; and
Page 43
Inform the Committee if there was any specific information that could be provided on a review of the
Mayor’s housing policies and strategies in the light of the link between COVID-19 mortality and overcrowded living conditions. That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation In progress. Senior Policy Adviser. with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from the discussion.
Actions Arising from the Committee meeting on 4 November 2020
Minute Topic Status For Action Item
6. London’s Christmas Economy and the Impact of COVID-19 That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation Completed. with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from See Agenda the discussion. Item 5.
Actions Arising from the Committee meeting on 8 September 2020
Minute Topic Status For Action Item
6. COVID-19 and the High Street That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation In progress. A Senior Policy with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from report is being Adviser. the discussion. prepared.
Page 44
Actions arising from the Committee meeting on 12 February 2020
Minute Topic Status For Action Item 5. Food Insecurity
During the course of the discussion, the Co-Founder and In progress. Co-Founder and CEO, Olio, agreed to provide the Committee with more Followed up CEO, Olio. information about what their longitudinal model showed. on 11 December
2020.
That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation The outputs Senior Policy with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from from this item Adviser. the discussion. are under discussion, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Actions arising from the Committee meeting on 14 January 2020
Minute Topic Status For Action Item 5. London’s Retail Sector – Keeping London’s High Streets Open That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation In progress. To Senior Policy with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from be combined Adviser. the discussion. with output from 8 September 2020. A report is being prepared.
3. Legal Implications
3.1 The Committee has the power to do what is recommended in this report.
4. Financial Implications
4.1 There are no financial implications to the GLA arising from this report.
Page 45
List of appendices to this report: Appendix 1 – Correspondence from the City of London Corporation, dated 15 December 2020
Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985 List of Background Papers: None.
Contact Officer: Lauren Harvey, Senior Committee Officer Telephone: 020 7983 4383 E-mail: [email protected]
Page 46 Appendix 1
Meeting held on 15 December 2020: Changing Nature of Work After COVID-19 Correspondence received: Dear Leonie,
Thank you very much for the Economy Committee’s invitation to the City Corporation to give evidence on the future of the office this morning – I thought it was a very interesting session, and hope the Committee found our evidence useful.
Following one of Laura’s answers, Assembly Member Bailey asked for sight of the City Corporation reports she had mentioned. I attach for the Committee’s information the recent London Recharged report [see here] which sets out the Corporation’s vision for the London of 2025.
A benchmarking piece, looking at London’s competitiveness in a global context, is due to be published on 22nd January, and I will of course be very happy to share it with the Committee in due course. A virtual launch event looking at the future competitiveness of London and the UK will take place on January 22nd, to which you and other members of the Committee would be very welcome to attend. Do let me know if you would like me to arrange invitations.
Finally, Laura mentioned a report arising from the work of the City’s Recovery Taskforce which is due to be published in March. When I have more information I will share it with you and the Committee.
Do let me know if you have any questions or if we can be of any other assistance.
Sent via email on 15 December 2020
Page 47 This page is intentionally left blank
Page 48 Agenda Item 5
Subject: Action Taken Under Delegated Authority Report to: Economy Committee
Report of: Executive Director of Secretariat Date: 20 January 2021
This report will be considered in public
1. Summary
1.1 This report sets out recent action taken by the Chair of the Economy Committee under delegated authority.
2. Recommendation
2.1 That the Committee notes the action taken by the Chair of the Economy Committee under delegated authority, in consultation with party Group Lead Members, namely to agree the Committee’s report, Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas Economy and COVID-19.
3. Background
3.1 Under Standing Orders and the Assembly’s Scheme of Delegation, certain decisions by Members can be taken under delegated authority. This report details those actions.
3.2 At its meeting on 4 November 2020, the Committee held a meeting on the impact of COVID-19 on London’s Christmas economy and resolved:
That authority be delegated to the Chair, in consultation with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output from the discussion.
3.3 Following that meeting, the Chair consulted party Group Lead Members on the Committee’s report, Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas Economy and COVID-19.
City Hall, The Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2AA Enquiries: 020 7983 4100 minicom: 020 7983 4458 www.london.gov.uk Page 49
4. Issues for Consideration
4.1 Following consultation, the Chair agreed the Committee’s report, which was published on 12 December 2020. The report is attached at Appendix 1.
4.2 The Committee is asked to note the report and the action taken under delegated authority.
5. Legal Implications
5.1 The Committee has the power to do what is recommended in the report.
6. Financial Implications
6.1 There are no direct financial implications to the Greater London Authority arising from this report.
List of appendices to this report: Appendix 1 – Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas Economy and COVID-19, dated 12 December 2020
Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985 List of Background Papers: Member Delegated Authority Form: 1246 [London’s Christmas Economy] Contact Officer: Lauren Harvey, Senior Committee Officer Telephone: 020 7983 4383 E-mail: [email protected]
Page 50 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 1
Appendix 1
Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 Economy Committee
LONDONASSEMBLY
Page 51 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 2
Economy Committee
The Economy Committee scrutinises the work of the Mayor relating to economic development, wealth creation, social development, culture, sport and tourism in the capital. It also examines the Mayor’s role as chair of the London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP).
Contact us
Dan Tattersall Senior Policy Adviser [email protected]
Aoife Nolan External Communications Officer [email protected]
Lauren Harvey Senior Committee Officer [email protected]
Page 52 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 3
Contents
Economy Committee ...... 2 Contact us ...... 2 Contents ...... 3 Foreword ...... 4 The Economy Committee’s investigation...... 6 Executive summary and recommendations ...... 6 What is the Golden Quarter? ...... 8 What does a COVID-affected Christmas look like across London? ...... 9 How are the sectors of London’s economy interlinked? ...... 10 Survey results ...... 12 Retail ...... 13 Hospitality ...... 15 Arts and culture ...... 17 Tourism ...... 20 Other formats and languages ...... 23 Connect with us ...... 24
Page 53 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 4
Foreword
Leonie Cooper AM Chair of the Economy Committee
The lead-up to Christmas 2020 has been like no other. For four weeks during November, normally a key time in the Christmas shopping calendar, shops and restaurants were shut, and people were urged to stay at home - something that Londoners have become wearily used to in 2020.
Businesses across the capital have had an extremely challenging year. With Christmas typically being their busiest time for many retail stores, theatres, and hospitality venues, the London Assembly Economy Committee investigated how COVID-19 has impacted London’s economy in the run-up to Christmas. How has London battled through the second national lockdown of 2020?
The Economy Committee heard from businesses, entertainers and representatives from the culture industry on the impact that COVID-19 restrictions have had on them in the run-up to Christmas.
According to UK Hospitality, 40% of annual revenues for central London hospitality venues are earned between Halloween and New Year’s Eve. For four weeks of that time period, hospitality businesses were closed and now, with stricter Tier 2 restrictions, and Tier 3 possibly looming, this will cause further strain on these businesses. For other retail businesses across the capital, we heard that November and December are when a retail store will make profits to make the rest of the year viable. Due to the impact of COVID-19 on these businesses, more support will need to be provided into 2021.
But as well as hearing from businesses about Christmas, we also heard from Londoners about their Christmas shopping plans for this year. 80% of Londoners are planning their Christmas shopping online this year, compared to 2019, when 60% of people in the UK said they would
Page 54 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 5 do some or all of their Christmas shopping online.1 2020 has accelerated the move by Londoners to do more shopping online - and businesses must be supported in either expanding their online presence or gaining access to the online market. Our research also found that 3 in 5 Londoners would be more likely to shop with local businesses if they offered a ‘Click and Collect’ service. So we’re calling on the Mayor to support businesses to create or expand their online offering so they can provide a local click and collect service.
The high street has been heavily impacted this year by COVID-19 and our research found that only 1 in 10 Londoners plan to do all their Christmas shopping in-store. By helping businesses get online and offer a click and collect service to Londoners, this could provide the vital assistance that they need to boost sales. The Mayor must help businesses through the next few months by establishing a programme that provides practical and financial support to help small and medium-sized enterprises either create or expand their online offering, or 2021 will be even tougher than 2020.
1 Internet Retailing, UK high street shopper numbers set to fall by more than 70% this peak Christmas trading period as shoppers turn online instead: studies, 2 November 2020
Page 55 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 6
The Economy Committee’s investigation The Economy Committee wanted to understand the value of Christmas to London’s economy in a normal year and gain an insight into the effect that COVID-19 has had on specific sectors of the city’s economy. In addition, the Committee wanted to assess what further Mayoral and government support is required, both immediately and long term, to support London’s businesses through a very tough year and ensure they are there in the future, when the pandemic is over.
The Committee spoke to policy experts, gained in-depth insights from a retail manager and a business owner in the cultural sector, and additionally, surveyed Londoners to find out their plans for Christmas shopping and spending.
Key contributors: • Paul Fleming, General Secretary, Equity • Dominic Curran, Policy Adviser – Property, British Retail Consortium • Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive Officer, UKHospitality • Jace Tyrell, Chief Executive, New West End Company • Scott Simpson, Spokesperson, Tudor Markets • Rosie Loker, Tailor Made Music Agency
Executive summary London’s economy has been severely impacted by COVID-19, and the measures put in place to stop the spread of the virus. The Christmas trading period, known as the ‘Golden Quarter’ is pivotal to the year-round success of much of the city’s retail, hospitality and cultural sectors. This year the downturn in trade across all sectors during this critical period has been significant. Businesses will require continued and increased support into 2021 and beyond if they are to recover, and the Mayor has a role to play in this.
Page 56 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 7
Recommendations
Recommendation 1
The Mayor should establish a programme that provides practical and financial support to help small and medium-sized enterprises begin trading online or improve their existing online presence, enables businesses to offer click-and-collect services, and he should then track the subsequent growth in the number of businesses that are able to offer these services across the capital.
Recommendation 2
The Mayor should lobby for an extension of the reduction in VAT rate to 5% for the hospitality and tourism sector until the end of March 2022.
Recommendation 3
The Mayor should create a new responsibility on the Mayoral team, dedicated to advocating for London’s performing arts.
Recommendation 4
The Mayor should continue to lobby the government to reverse the decision to end tax-free international shopping, and update the Committee as to how he is actively engaging with the government to advocate on this issue.
Recommendation 5
The Mayor should update the Committee on the impact so far of the Domestic Tourism Consortium, and how it will be used to promote domestic tourism as an integral part of London’s economic recovery in 2021 and beyond.
Page 57 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 8
What is the Golden Quarter?
In the retail and hospitality industries, the three months of peak seasonal trading leading up to Christmas are referred to as the ‘Golden Quarter’.2 Christmas shopping, office parties and seasonal tourism all contribute to this boom period. Research from the Bank of England shows that a typical household spends over £800 more in December alone than the average spend for each of the other eleven months of the year, with extra expenditure on gifts, going out for Christmas celebrations, and on food and alcohol.3
The Golden Quarter is very aptly named because it is the period for most retailers when they actually turn a profit. For a lot of retailers, they may need to trade at 90% of normal volumes before they make a profit on a day-to-day basis, but looking at it annually it is really November/December where a store will turn a profit and make the rest of the year viable. It is particularly important because the months of January/February/March tend to be fairly lean until we get to Easter. It is a little bit like a squirrel gathering nuts to last it through a barren winter. This is the period when you make the cash that turns a profit that enables you to go through to next year. If there is a downturn or if it is a particularly difficult quarter, then what you are going to see is a much, much harder time in the first quarter, those three months, of next year.
Dominic Curran, Policy Adviser – Property British Retail Consortium
In central London hospitality, 40% of your [annual] revenues are earned between Halloween and New Year’s Eve… The benefit of it is not just that you get 40% of your revenue, but it is already booked. It is booked six to eight months out…
Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive UKHospitality
2 IMRG, The Golden Quarter of retail: how to plan a successful content strategy 3 Bank of England, What do we spend at Christmas?
Page 58 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 9
What does a COVID-affected Christmas look like across London?
The three months leading up to Christmas 2020 have been anything but golden for London’s economy. Restrictions to slow the spread of the virus – first under Tier 2 of the three-tier system, then a four-week national lockdown, then with a return to stricter version of Tier 2 restrictions. Non-essential retail was only allowed to provide delivery or click-and-collect services under the national lockdown, and pubs and restaurants have been placed under restrictions throughout both the tiered system (with a closing-time curfew and, no mixing of households to take place indoors, maximum groups of six outdoors and, from 2 December, permission to only sell alcoholic beverages with a substantial meal), and the national lockdown (open only for takeaway services).
Government support has been provided to help protect jobs (with the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme extended to the end of March 2021 and the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme extended until the end of April 2021) and businesses (including an extension of the temporary VAT cut for the tourism and hospitality sectors until the end of March 2021, a grant scheme for businesses under Tier 2 restrictions, and the option for businesses to pay back deferred VAT bills in smaller instalments).4,5
Although these measures have been welcomed by industry leaders6 – several of whom had been lobbying for improvements to support over the first few months of the pandemic – the Committee heard that many of London’s businesses remain operating on a financial knife-edge, with the city’s retail, hospitality, culture and tourism sectors in a perilous position.
Christmas for us: normally in the West End we would turn over £10 billion a year, £10 billion, and remember…, one in ten Londoners work in the West End… With this further lockdown…we are lucky to get to £1.5 billion, so an 85% drop in sales from March [2020] to March [2021], effectively.
Jace Tyrrell, Chief Executive New West End Company
4 HM Treasury, Chancellor outlines Winter Economy Plan, 24 September 2020 5 HM Treasury, Plan for Jobs: Chancellor increases financial support for businesses and workers, 22 October 2020 6 HM Treasury, Plan for Jobs: Chancellor increases financial support for businesses and workers, 22 October 2020
Page 59 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 10
…for many of these businesses - the London hotels in particular and the London pubs and restaurants - they were banking on having that trading period to get them through and get them into a breakeven period. In central London, 90% of those businesses are operating below profitability and have been for the whole of this year. It is quite significant.
Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive UKHospitality
To put it in context, although we are split about 50 per cent regular markets, 50 per cent Christmas markets, but around 75 per cent of our annual turnover is from our Christmas markets. Now we have lost that, another 70 per cent has decreased from our regular markets in terms of income. We have been hit quite badly. Although those traders come to us to support them, we also need to try to support ourselves to ensure we can keep the markets open.
Scott Simpson, Spokesperson Tudor Markets
How are the sectors of London’s economy interlinked?
The different sectors of London’s economy are interlinked and interdependent. Supporting one sector has positive knock-on effects for others. Culture, retail and hospitality are a combined appeal for Londoners, and domestic and international tourists. Consider, for example, a seasonal tourist that has decided to come to London with their family to soak up the city’s festive atmosphere and do some Christmas shopping. They stay in a hotel, eat and drink at restaurants and bars, see a West End Christmas show, and visit Christmas markets.
Page 60 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 11
… live entertainment is a major stimulator of people at pubs and clubs and hotels and so on….
Paul Fleming, General Secretary Equity
In somewhere like the West End, we think there would be more demand to create an environment where you would spend more time with hospitality and the culture and the leisure and the theatres and everything else that goes with that. In the medium term, we have to pivot the West End particularly, and probably central London, to that market moving forward, obviously by planning policy and other elements of the public policy agenda to support that. In the immediate crisis obviously is to get some liquidity into these businesses and then get them to shore up their balance sheets.
Jace Tyrrell, Chief Executive New West End Company
Page 61 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 12
Survey results
The Economy Committee’s surveyed Londoners to find out about their shopping and spending intentions over the Christmas period. The results below emphasize the importance of helping businesses establish an online presence and offer click-and-collect services.
Page 62 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 13
Retail
Recommendation
The Mayor should establish a programme that provides practical and financial support to help small and medium-sized enterprises begin trading online or improve their existing online presence, enables businesses to offer click-and-collect services, and he should then track the subsequent growth in the number of businesses that are able to offer these services across the capital.
Retail, especially ‘non-essential’ retail, has been impacted heavily by the pandemic. Since April, the Centre for Cities’ high streets recovery tracker has consistently ranked London in the lowest five (out of the 63 UK cities and towns analysed by the tracker) in terms of the extent to which high street footfall and high street spend has returned.7 Many of the issues experienced by the high street, such as reduced footfall due to social distancing measures, nervousness about using public transport, and the shift to online spending, have become even more acute over the Christmas trading period. The Committee’s survey of Londoners found that 80 per cent planned to do some or all of their Christmas shopping online, and 31 per cent of those who told us they would shop solely online for Christmas presents said it is because they are nervous to go out due to COVID-19. These effects are not being felt evenly across London, with the Committee hearing that inner London and the Central Activity Zone have been particularly heavily impacted.
Large retailers with significant capacity have been able to divert resources towards online shopping. For example, John Lewis has brought its Christmas shop online for the first time in history to allow shoppers to navigate through its virtual Oxford Street store.8 Tesco has responded to increased online demand by recruiting more than 11,000 temporary staff this year.9 However these options are not readily accessible for many of the thousands of small, independent stores that make up London’s high streets – impacting in particular those smaller stores in central London.
7 Centre for Cities, High Streets Recovery Tracker, August 2020 8 John Lewis, Virtual Christmas shop 9 Retail Gazette, Tesco hiring 11,000 temporary staff to meet online spike as unemployment hits 3-year high, 13 October 2020
Page 63 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 14
There is a huge desire on the part of smaller businesses to get access to that level of support [to trade online], … there are a lot of smaller businesses in central London, who will have seen a huge drop-off in footfall and not had that online presence to at least make up some of that fall in revenue... I think there is a particular issue for smaller businesses in central London who are kind of caught between two stools. They are not in local communities with high levels of footfall and they are not large multiples who have access to the resources to have a significant online presence.
Dominic Curran, Policy Adviser – Property British Retail Consortium
Many of these operators and traders will buy stock from a cash-and-carry and then they will go on a market stall. They have not maybe had that education of, “Have you tried selling this online? I know this stock is now almost dead but you could try it online”. Without that education, it is very difficult for them to do so… Offering support, maybe virtual mentorships or other business offering support in some way, shape or form, even if it is just free-guided, “Hey, here is how to do Facebook advertising, here is how to put a Facebook page together”, that has been written by a company that know what they are doing, just to help support.
Scott Simpson, Spokesperson Tudor Markets
However, facilitating small businesses to get online will not help everyone; many small businesses such as hairdressers or beauty parlours cannot operate online. Furthermore, for many businesses the costs of operating online are higher than in physical stores for those which already have a high street presence. The consequences for the other sectors of the economy of retail moving online to too great an extent needs to be considered as well. If shoppers no longer come into stores, they will no longer visit the café next door or the pub opposite.
Page 64 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 15
There is still going to be a market for physical retail and for customers to come in. In somewhere like the West End, we think there would be more demand to create an environment where you would spend more time with hospitality and the culture and the leisure and the theatres and everything else that goes with that.
Jace Tyrrell, Chief Executive New West End Company
Hospitality
Recommendation
The Mayor should lobby for an extension of the reduction in VAT rate to 5% for the hospitality and tourism sector until the end of March 2022
The effect of the pandemic, and the measures taken to curb the spread of infection, have been particularly pronounced for the hospitality industry and the night-time economy. The implementation of Tier 2 restrictions, and then the nationwide lockdown, have had profound implications for the sector. Hospitality venues in London typically rely on pre-booked events over the Christmas period, where knowing customer numbers in advance and receiving deposits allows for accurate purchasing of supplies and recruiting of staff.10
Seasonal corporate events are huge business, especially for the restaurants, bars, pubs and venues around which they revolve. A survey conducted by Travelodge in 2018 found that, on average, workers in London were planning eleven festive events with co-workers – including drinks, lunches, dinners and parties – spending a combined amount of £631 each on the events, clothes for the occasions, and transport.11 It is part of an estimated £10 billion national expenditure on these office parties.12
10 London Assembly Economy Committee meeting, 4 November 2020 11 London Loves Business, How many billions will be spent on office Christmas parties this month?, 6 December 2018 12 London Loves Business, How many billions will be spent on office Christmas parties this month?, 6 December 2018
Page 65 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 16
In central London hospitality, 40% of your revenues are earned between Halloween and New Year’s Eve. Whatever happens with the decisions about regulations, that is not coming back for most of those businesses because it is pre-booked events and it is corporate events. The benefit of it is not just that you get 40% of your revenue, but it is already booked. It is booked six to eight months out, …you can bank on that, you can make plans for your food purchasing and your staffing.
It is pretty much guaranteed profit because it is already priced in. That is hugely significant and for many of these businesses - the London hotels in particular and the London pubs and restaurants - they were banking on having that trading period to get them through and get them into a breakeven period. In central London, 90% of those businesses are operating below profitability and have been for the whole of this year. It is quite significant.
Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive UKHospitality
The Committee heard that businesses and venues across London had invested millions of pounds to become COVID-secure, and that encouraging retail footfall, reopening of the cultural sector, and encouraging domestic and international tourism back to London – all in a COVID- safe way – would be pivotal to the survival of London’s hospitality.
The Committee also heard that an extension of the Value Added Tax (VAT) cut for the hospitality and tourism sector would be a big benefit. VAT for these sectors was cut to 5 per cent until March 2021, but in order to keep London’s sector competitive and attractive for international and domestic tourism the Committee recommends that this cut be further extended until the end of the 2021/22 financial year. This would also provide a greater ability for the sector to endure, and recover from, any further lockdown measures that could be implemented in London, especially with the ongoing possibility of the capital being placed into Tier 3 restrictions.
Crucially, for our sector the Value Added Tax (VAT) cut for tourism and hospitality has been fantastically helpful and it means that London is competitive…Having a VAT cut helps to make us competitive, it will provide a stimulus for demand to return
Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive UKHospitality
Page 66 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 17
Arts and culture
Recommendation
The Mayor should create a new responsibility in the Mayoral team dedicated to advocating for London’s performing arts.
Social distancing measures have impacted the creative industries significantly, especially live performance. For many theatres, it has simply not been financially viable to operate with the reductions in audience numbers that are required to guarantee physical distancing and audience safety. The Committee also heard that the uncertainties resulting from changing restrictions have made it very hard for theatres to plan shows due to the lead times involved.
The way our industry works, you cannot turn it on and turn it off, and you cannot do it without an audience.
Paul Fleming, General Secretary Equity
Christmas, typically, is a time when many theatres and artists make profits that see them through the rest of the year.
The one kind of twinkling hope was Christmas, because Christmas of course is a phenomenal period of time for our members to earn.
Paul Fleming, General Secretary Equity
However, that has not been the case this year. For example, four of London’s biggest pantomimes announced in August that they would be cancelled for 2020, stating that “the continued uncertainty of government guidelines for restarting public performances” led to the
Page 67 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 18
“inevitable decision” to postpone productions to 2021. Over 145,000 people attended the four shows last year, providing work for 285 freelance artists and staff.13 Two of these four theatres (Lyric Hammersmith Theatre and the Theatre Royal Stratford East) have stated that pantomimes typically account for almost a third of their box office income.14
Furthermore, as the Committee explored in its June meeting, and conveyed in its letter to the Chancellor on 23 September, it is not just those directly involved with producing cultural shows like these that are affected: there are also knock-on effects up the creative supply chain, and secondary effects on hospitality – for example, theatregoers that previously would also spend a night in a hotel and go out for dinner.15
Financial support has been directed towards the cultural sector. In April the Mayor launched an emergency £2.3 million Culture at Risk Fund, to “support London’s creative and cultural industries at risk due to the impact of the coronavirus”.16 The targeted fund is designed to help grassroots music and LGBTQ+ venues, creative workspaces and independent cinemas.17 Central government support arrived in June by way of £1.57 billion of funding for cultural and heritage organisations,18 and again in October with a share of £257 million shared between 1,385 theatres, arts venues, museums and cultural organisations.19 The fund is designed to allow venues to plan for reopening and support the resumption of live performances.
The Committee heard that whilst this government funding had been vital to the survival of large established institutions, many smaller businesses and self-employed creatives were not in receipt of support. The Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, acknowledged in November that a third of freelancers were not able to access government support.20 Furthermore, a lack of innovation to promote small-scale, safe community engagement from performers was reported to the Committee as a missed opportunity to keep elements of the creative arts running. In Belgium and New Zealand, for example, artists and performers have been used to encourage visitors back into retail districts, provide entertainment, and create work for the creative community.21
In the absence of this innovation and creative thinking in regulation to encourage performance and owing to the gaps in the financial support for self-employed creatives, the Committee were warned that many people would be forced to leave the sector altogether, which would not affect all parts of the workforce equally.
13 Standard, Four of London's leading pantomimes cancelled amid reopening uncertainty, 10 August 2020 14 The Stage, UK theatre faces £90 million losses as panto season is axed, 11 August 2020 15 London Assembly Economy Committee, Supporting London businesses through the COVID-19 pandemic, 23 September 2020 16 Mayor of London, Mayor launches new fund to support London’s at risk culture, 30 April 2020. 17 Mayor of London, Mayor launches new fund to support London’s at risk culture, 30 April 2020. 18 The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, £1.57 billion investment to protect Britain’s world-class cultural, arts and heritage institutions, 5 July 2020 19 HM Government, £257 million to save 1385 theatres, arts venues, museums and cultural organisations across England, 12 October 2020 20 Hansard, Topical questions volume 683, 5 November 2020 21 London Assembly Economy Committee meeting, 4 November 2020
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The cancellation of Christmas for our members in 2020 may well mean that they leave the industry. To go right back to what I said at the beginning, the people disproportionately affected by this - black artists, disabled artists, older artists and so on - are people who are underrepresented in the industry in the first place. We are going to be losing working-class Londoners from our profession, which is already disproportionately populated by people of middle or higher socioeconomic status.
Paul Fleming, General Secretary Equity
Overall, the Committee heard that the performing arts needed greater representation in London, that would better recognise its central role in London’s economy and provide greater advocacy to the Government on behalf of performers and creative practitioners.
When we talk about the theatre district in London, we do not have anybody within the Mayor’s team that we can point to and say, “You are the live performance person”. They have Amy Lamé doing brilliant work as the Night Czar, but looking at the night-time economy as a whole, not just live performance. We have a real interest from the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor [for Culture and the Creative Industries, Justine Simons OBE] in terms of visual art, and that is to be commended, but there is this real gap in something which is a core of what makes London what it is.
Paul Fleming, General Secretary Equity
Page 69 Has the Golden Goose become a Turkey? London’s Christmas economy and COVID-19 - Economy Committee December 2020 20
Tourism
Recommendations
The Mayor should continue to lobby the government to reverse the decision to end tax-free international shopping, and update the Committee as to how he is actively engaging the government to advocate on this issue.
The Mayor should update the Committee on the impact so far of the Domestic Tourism Consortium, and how it will be used to promote domestic tourism as an integral part of London’s economic recovery in 2021 and beyond.
London typically benefits from both international and domestic festive tourism. In 2019, more than 14 million people planned to take a Christmas break with at least one overnight stay, and London was the number one destination for festive domestic tourism.22
There were 5.6 million international visitors to London in Quarter 4 of 2019, who spent a total of £4.4 billion.23 VisitBritain’s latest national forecasts (compiled in October) predict that in 2020, total inbound international tourism will be down 74 per cent and spend down 79 per cent, compared to pre-COVID forecasts.24 VisitBritain’s figures predict that domestic tourism spend is down 49 per cent for 2020, a smaller reduction than international tourism spending. Analysis of VisitBritain’s data, published by the Mayor on 23 October, found that spending by tourists in central London is set to reduce £10.9 billion this year.25
…international tourism spent in the CAZ [Central Activity Zone] in December alone is £2.3 billion.
Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive UKHospitality
Stimulating both domestic and international tourism will be key to London’s recovery from the economic impacts of the pandemic.
22 Mirror, Brits set to give UK economy £14billion boost on festive breaks this Christmas, 17 December 2019 23 London Datastore, Number of international visitors to London, updated August 2020 24 VisitBritain, 2020 tourism forecast 25 Mayor of London, Mayor reveals tourist spending in central London to plummet by £10.9bn, 23 October 2020
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In September, the Government announced that tax-free shopping for international visitors would be ended. The Association of International Retailers has said that this will drive down visitor numbers at a crucial time and estimated that it could leave the Treasury £3.5 billion worse off. London’s West End has been highlighted as being particularly vulnerable to the changes,26 with the Central London Alliance (a collection of London businesses, communities and charities) calling for a reversal to the decision.27 The Mayor has also called on the Government to reverse the decision, and the Committee is calling for continued active and demonstrable representation on behalf of London’s businesses on this matter.
The other big issue, which colleagues will be aware of, is tax-free shopping, this disastrous decision to take us out at the worst possible timing, which we do not need to do. The Chancellor currently is taking us out of tax-free shopping on 1 January [2021]. We will be the only country in Europe that will not have this benefit anymore. It is an almighty impact, not just to retail but to the airlines and hospitality. Outside of London and inside London, there are 120,000 manufacturing jobs that rely on that. We do know that our key markets, tourism markets that are so crucial to London - the Middle East, Far East - are highly price-sensitive. When they can go to Paris for 20% off, they are going to go there. Also, UK visitors will not come to London; they will go to Paris and Europe because, again, they can buy 20% cheaper. There is a knock-on effect of this.
Jace Tyrrell, Chief Executive New West End Company
Experts at the Committee’s November meeting highlighted the need to significantly prioritise the promotion of London domestically, with established bodies primarily focussed on international markets or, in response to the pandemic, promoting London to Londoners. VisitBritain (the national tourist agency) and VisitEngland (England’s tourist board) are designed to promote the country to incoming tourists. London & Partners (L&P) was initially established to promote London internationally. In June 2019, the Domestic Tourism Consortium was launched by the Mayor, and backed by £600,000 of funding to help L&P expand its remit to promote London domestically.28 L&P has also, during the height of the pandemic when intercity domestic travel was not taking place, promoted London to Londoners themselves through the ‘Because I’m a Londoner’ campaign.29 As Laura Citron, Chief Executive Officer of L&P, told the Committee at its June meeting “The objective of the campaign is to support our retail, hospitality and cultural events businesses to survive this period of coronavirus with a particular focus on smaller businesses in local areas…we need to encourage people to understand that supporting your local business is an act of solidarity with the city.”30
26 Association of International Retail, Short Briefing on Tax-Free Shopping, September 2020 27 Central London Alliance, Our Manifesto, 20 November 2020 28 Mayor of London, MD2478 London & Partners – Domestic Tourism Consortium, 21 June 2019 29 L&P, Visit London, Because I’m a Londoner 30 London Assembly Economy Committee meeting, 17 June 2020
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Domestic tourism will be vital to London’s recovery, and it is imperative that the Mayor develops a clear strategy for using the Domestic Tourism Consortium as a part of that recovery.
Then, post-January [2021], that is when we are into attracting other people from other parts of the country to come and have a spring break in London. Come down and see London when the tourists are not here, when you can get around and you are not tripping over lots of people. You have a unique opportunity to explore your capital city. It needs somebody to own that and it needs somebody to drive that.
Kate Nicholls, Chief Executive UKHospitality
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Other formats and languages
If you, or someone you know needs this report in large print or braille, or a copy of the summary and main findings in another language, then please call us on: 020 7983 4100 or email [email protected]
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Connect with us
The London Assembly City Hall The Queen’s Walk More London London SE1 2AA
Website: www.london.gov.uk/abous-us/london-assembly Phone: 020 7983 4000
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Page 74 Agenda Item 6
Subject: Models for Economic Recovery: Cooperatives and Universal Basic Income
Report to: Economy Committee
Report of: Executive Director of Secretariat Date: 20 January 2021
This report will be considered in public
1. Summary
1.1 This report provides background information for the Economy Committee meeting on the role of cooperatives and universal basic income (UBI) in London’s economic recovery from COVID-19.
2. Recommendations
2.1 That the Committee notes the report as background to putting questions to invited guests on the role of cooperatives and universal basic income in London’s economic recovery from COVID-19, and notes the subsequent discussion.
2.2 That the Committee delegates authority to the Chair, in consultation with party Group Lead Members, to agree any output arising from the discussion.
3. Background
3.1 The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to stop the spread of the virus have had significant economic consequences for London and the country as a whole.
3.2 Advocates of cooperatives argue that a growth in the cooperative sector would foster community and economic resilience and reduce wealth inequality.
3.3 Advocates of UBI suggest that it is a simpler and more inclusive form of welfare that increases financial security.
3.4 The Committee will explore whether and how the Mayor could support cooperatives and trials of UBI, and how they could be incorporated into his economic recovery plans for London.
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4. Issues for Consideration
4.1 The Committee will seek to understand the role that cooperatives could play in London’s economic recovery from COVID-19, and explore how the Mayor could integrate a greater focus on cooperatives into London’s economic recovery plans.
4.2 The Committee will also investigate the merits and drawbacks of UBI; explore the different types of UBI and how they could be applied to London’s economic recovery from COVID-19; and seek to understand the practicalities of implementing a UBI trial in London.
Invited guests 4.3 The following guests have been invited to attend the meeting, others are to be confirmed:
Cooperatives Seema Malhotra MP; and Jessica Jacobs, Camden Community Makers.
UBI Daniel Mermelstein, UBI Lab London.
5. Legal Implications
5.1 The Committee has the power to do what is recommended in the report.
6. Financial Implications
6.1 There are no direct financial implications to the GLA arising from this report.
List of appendices to this report: None.
Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985 List of Background Papers: None
Contact Officer: Dan Tattersall, Senior Policy Adviser Telephone: 07783 805825 E-mail: [email protected]
Page 76 Agenda Item 7
Subject: Referred Motion Report to: Economy Committee
Report of: Executive Director of Secretariat Date: 20 January 2021
This report will be considered in public
1. Summary
1.1 The Committee is asked to consider the motion set out, which has been referred to the Committee by the London Assembly.
2. Recommendation
2.1 That the Committee considers the motion referred to it by the London Assembly at its meeting on 5 November 2020.
3. Issues for Consideration
3.1 At the London Assembly (Plenary) meeting on 5 November 2020, the Assembly agreed to refer the following motion to the Economy Committee:
“This Assembly notes that:
Financial security is critical to a stable and thriving society.
According to Trust for London close to a third of Londoners live in poverty, even before the coronavirus crisis our city had the highest poverty rates in the UK.
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) could help alleviate poverty, opening the door to opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach, and liberate people from the anxiety of job insecurity through a monthly income regardless of employment status, wealth, or marital status.
The existence of a UBI must be in addition to targeted welfare payments to those who have additional needs - such as for housing, for single parents, or for expenses incurred due to disabilities.
A network of UBI Labs have been set up and works with local authorities across the UK developing UBI proposals to address problems such as poverty, inequality, discrimination and environmental damage, long-term and immediately, in relation to coronavirus.
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There are many potential benefits to a UBI including:
o More flexible workforce and greater freedom to change jobs;
o Supporting a caring economy to value unpaid work;
o Removing the negative impacts of benefit sanctions and conditionality; and
o Enabling greater opportunities for people to work in community and cultural activities or to train or reskill in areas that will be needed to transition to a lower- carbon economy
The current crisis has increased the risk of poverty for many Londoners. This is the right time to trial Universal Basic Income.
520 elected representatives from every part of the UK have recently written to the Chancellor asking him to support pilots of Universal Basic Income in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
This Assembly calls on the Mayor to:
Write to the government calling for a fully evaluated basic income pilot in the city; and
Work with local authorities to help test UBI in London.”
3.2 The Committee is recommended to consider the referred motion.
4. Legal Implications
4.1 The Committee has the power to do what is recommended in this report.
5. Financial Implications
5.1 There are no direct finance implications arising from this report.
List of appendices to this report: None.
Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985 List of Background Papers: None.
Contact Officer: Lauren Harvey, Senior Committee Officer Telephone: 020 7983 4383 Email: [email protected]
Page 78 Agenda Item 8
Subject: Economy Committee Work Programme
Report to: Economy Committee
Report of: Executive Director of Secretariat Date: 20 January 2021
This report will be considered in public
1. Summary
1.1 This report sets out the work programme for the Economy Committee for the rest of the 2020/21 Assembly year.
2. Recommendation
2.1 That the Committee notes its work programme for the remainder of the 2020/21 Assembly year.
3. Background
3.1 The Committee receives a report monitoring the progress of its work programme at each meeting.
4. Issues for Consideration
Models for economic recovery: cooperatives and universal basic income 4.1 The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to stop the spread of the virus have had significant economic consequences for London and the country as a whole. Advocates of cooperatives argue that a growth in the cooperative sector would foster community and economic resilience and reduce wealth inequality. Advocates of universal basic income (UBI) suggest that it is a simpler and more inclusive form of welfare that increases financial security. The Committee will explore whether and how the Mayor could support cooperatives and trials of UBI, and how they could be incorporated into his economic recovery plans for London
Work Programme for the Remainder of the Assembly Year 4.2 The table below sets out the remainder of allocated dates for the Economy Committee that are currently scheduled for the 2020/21 Assembly year. The topic below was agreed by the Chair of the GLA Oversight Committee on 3 December 2020.
Date Topic 2 March 2021 Review of the term
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5. Legal Implications
5.1 The Committee has the power to do what is recommended in this report.
6. Financial Implications
6.1 There are no financial implications to the Greater London Authority arising from this report.
List of appendices to this report: None.
Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985 List of Background Papers: None
Contact Officer: Dan Tattersall, Senior Policy Adviser Telephone: 07783 805825 E-mail: [email protected]
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