City Hall skills bootcamps to receive £27m funding boost April 17, 2025 City Hall is set to receive a funding boost of £27m for a skills bootcamp programme for Londoners, Sir Sadiq Khan has announced. The mayor of London has welcomed the funding from the Department for Education (DfE) which represents a 25 per cent annual uplift for the programme of flexible courses, across some 7,700 trainees, [...]
Small firm owners are leaving the UK en masse, survey finds April 15, 2025 Small business owners up and down the country are packing their bags to escape a flurry of higher taxes, soaring costs and red tape, fresh data has found. Nearly two in five owners of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) have either left the UK or are considering an imminent departure, according to a new survey, [...]
Londoners earn the most but spend very little, IFS finds April 11, 2025 Londoners top the ranking for income per head across the UK, yet spend very little after housing costs are taken into account, according to research by leading think tanks. A new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) signals that high housing costs in the capital city [...]
Layoffs creating bigger pool of jobseekers, recruiters say April 11, 2025 More people were added to the large pool of jobseekers in March than at any point since the pandemic, according to recruiters, as high levels of redundancies are driving a “steeper rise” in staff availability. Employers have come under greater strain in the months since Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ announced a £25bn national insurance tax raid [...]
A decade of departures: Moscow only city with worse millionaire exodus than London April 9, 2025 If Knight Frank’s inaugural Global Cities survey was anything to go by, London had the world at its feet in 2013. Respondents to the property giant’s annual poll of global wealth advisers declared the UK capital—not Singapore, Geneva, or any of America’s embarrassment of global cities—the ‘most important city in the world’ to their ultra-high-net-worth [...]
Avanti West Coast co-owner to launch €1bn Eurostar rival April 8, 2025 A co-owner of Avanti West Coast has confirmed plans to launch a €1bn (£856.6m) rival Eurostar which would run services between London and Paris. FS Italiane Group is looking to run a high-speed rail service between the two capitals by 2029. The group, which co-owns Avanti West Coast alongside FirstGroup, has put aside €1bn for [...]
Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt buys £42m London mansion April 8, 2025 Former Google chief Eric Schmidt has bought a London mansion for £42m in the latest sign that wealthy American buyers are becoming major players in the capital’s property market. According to FT, Schmidt bought the double-fronted, Victoria-era Holland Park mansion last May and plans to rent it out. The deal follows purchases from many other [...]
Council pay: Westminster tops ‘town hall rich list’ with 73 staff on over £100k March 31, 2025 Westminster City Council has topped a national ‘town hall rich list’ with 73 staff rewarded with over £100,000 last year. The central London borough council also had the most employees nationwide – at eight – receiving more than £200,000 in total remuneration, in 2023-24, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA). While 13 more Westminster staff [...]
London businesses dismiss Chancellor’s growth hopes March 24, 2025 Firms across London think the government will fall flat on its ambition to grow the UK economy, a new survey has shown. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has set out to woo businesses in the City of London over the last few years. But around nine in ten businesses across the capital doubt the government can achieve growth, [...]
Norwegian oil fund buys a quarter of Covent Garden from Shaftesbury March 20, 2025 Shaftesbury Capital has sold a quarter of Covent Garden to Norwegian oil fund Norges for £570m in the latest bet by Noway’s sovereign wealth fund on the capital. Under the terms of the contract, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) will buy a 25 per cent non-controlling stake in the £2.7bn Covent Garden estate, which Shaftesbury [...]