London Tories: Council tax hike is a result of Mayor’s mistakes January 14, 2021 Londoners are struggling. Businesses are closed. Our city’s streets are empty. And yet, it’s during the worst recession for 300 years, that Sadiq Khan has chosen to ask Londoners to pay for his mistakes. Khan’s whopping council tax rise couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Mayor wants to paint himself as the saviour [...]
Us versus them will do nobody any good on the High Street January 14, 2021 While a new year symbolises a fresh start for many, you could be forgiven for thinking you had been planted in the film Groundhog Day but instead the calendar was stuck in 2020. Perhaps nowhere is this more the case than in the retail and hospitality industry, with Lord Sugar’s legal challenge to the planned [...]
Debate: Should Primark open an online store? January 13, 2021 Overnight opening hours, queue-management systems and lashings of promotions – Primark did everything it could to keep its customers happy amid a year of on/off lockdown restrictions. But with parent company Associated British Food’s trading update out this week, is it time for the High Street phenomenon to go digital, too? Kam Phullar, Lead Strategist [...]
Government can give real steel to the green revolution January 13, 2021 Governments around the world are accelerating action against climate change. The election of Joe Biden has raised hopes that the US will take a leap forward and we are seeing more ambitious targets being set for decarbonisation in Europe, Japan and even China. In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has set out a promising [...]
London’s fintech scene could be a winner from the Covid crisis January 13, 2021 We all know the Covid-19 pandemic has been, and for too many remains, a devastating time. It’s easy to be pessimistic, too, even as vaccine rollout speeds up. Life will not go back to ‘normal’ quickly – the events of the last ten months will have profound repercussions for health services, businesses, debt and fiscal [...]
Our tech advances are difficult for productivity stats to compute January 13, 2021 One of the most depressing aspects of the decade of the 2010s, well before Covid-19 struck, was the apparently very slow growth in productivity. This is not a mere ivory tower issue. It is only through increasing productivity that rises in living standards can be sustained. Productivity is the key measure of the efficiency of [...]
Smart politicians will be looking to cities as a springboard for greatness January 12, 2021 For much of the second half of the 20th century, powerful city politics was dying. As the great industrial centres went into decline, so too did their once-proud corporations and mayors. County boroughs like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds were gathered together in 1972 and melded into metropolitan counties like “Merseyside” or “West Midlands”, and [...]
Government’s communications failures can be remedied – if they’re fixed soon January 12, 2021 The Prime Minister’s lockdown announcement last week has left a collective sense of déjà vu and a frustration at seemingly being back to square one ten months into the pandemic. Whilst we are facing an evolved virus, a key component to our fight against the virus has not changed: human behaviour. Rallying behind an approach [...]
The City is stepping up to offer mental health support January 11, 2021 The start of 2021 brings hope that this year will be a more positive one but there is no denying that the next few months will be tough as we deal with the national lockdown brought in by the Government to control the spread of COVID-19. So many of us are already feeling isolated and [...]
Crowdsourcing ideas only works if you do it right January 11, 2021 You’re the boss who knows change is necessary to keep your customers and colleagues on board – and even more so after a few rocky months. Like many in the same situation, you’re thinking: “My employees are a rich source for spotting problems, I’ll ask them what they’d change.” In theory, the approach has mass [...]