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The Two Cities Lowdown is Lowick Hedry’s weekly read on the City of Westminster and the City of London, written by the team that works both every day. A read for the commute or over a coffee, not a council report.
A heavy week, and a rare one where the two cities shared a stage. The London Real Estate Forum came to Guildhall on Wednesday, and Westminster chose the City’s platform to launch its first ever Growth Statement while its own chamber adopted the licensing policy that has been running as a national story since August. The City, meanwhile, is still waiting on two planning inspectors who hold rather a lot in their hands.
Top of the inbox
Cllr Tim Barnes, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Growth and Planning, used the LREF keynote to launch Westminster’s first Growth Statement, built on five priority sectors and a “towards yes” posture. The revised licensing policy was adopted at Full Council on Wednesday, with the West End cumulative impact zone shrinking rather than growing. The Oxford Street Development Corporation used its first LREF to set out how it intends to operate as a planning authority. In the City, the Corporation’s own estimate of what Historic England’s proposals would cost has grown sharply since the reopened City Plan 2040 hearing, while members’ preferred model for planning decisions after 31 October goes to Policy and Resources next Thursday.
Westminster
The Growth Statement: “towards yes”
Driving Growth is one of the four pillars this administration set out on taking office, alongside Safe Streets, Clean City and Value for Money. Until now it has carried plenty of broad sentiment but not a great deal of detail. That changed this week.
The Growth Statement is the council’s first, ten pages, and it landed from the LREF keynote stage at Guildhall rather than from a committee room. It is unambiguously a pitch to investors, and it is worth reading rather than skimming the press release.
The numbers the council has chosen to lead with. Westminster generated £94.8bn of economic output in 2023, around 4% of the national total, and collected over £2bn in business rates in 2025/26, roughly 7% of all business rates in England. It covers around half of London’s Central Activities Zone. The West End alone takes £8.9bn in annual sales and drew more than 85 million visits in 2025. Retail and hospitality generate £8.4bn of output and support around 146,000 jobs; creative industries support 119,400. Those figures exist to make an argument to the Treasury, and you will see them again before 28 October.
The admission worth noting. The Statement concedes that while demand for high-quality Grade A workspace remains strong, Westminster faces a shortage of the modern BREEAM Excellent or Outstanding offices occupiers now want. It also acknowledges that visitor numbers have recovered but spending has not kept pace, squeezing hospitality, retail and leisure. A council setting out its own supply gap in print is a council inviting applications.
Five priority sectors: retail, hospitality and visitor experiences; creative industries; health and life sciences; AI and digital technologies; built environment. Three strategic opportunities: Global Experiences across the West End, Knightsbridge and Victoria; Innovation and Discovery, built around St Mary’s, Imperial and Paddington plus the Harley Street Medical Area; and Sustainable Growth and the Built Environment, leaning hard on heritage retrofit and climate tech.
What the council commits to doing. Protect employment uses and support delivery of new high-quality commercial space including Grade A offices, though note the qualifier: where this accords with adopted and emerging planning policy. Develop sector growth plans with targeted interventions including affordable workspace. Align planning, regeneration, licensing and procurement behind growth. Use CIL, section 106 and social value to tie investment to local jobs. And, directly relevant after this summer, review and strengthen its approach to the evening and night-time economy, working with BIDs, transport operators and the Met on safety after dark.
The lobbying asks are explicit: VAT-free shopping, fairer local retention of business rates, and access to international talent. Employer National Insurance is named as a pressure on labour-intensive sectors. Swaddle has already written to the Chancellor on this.
The phrase to hold onto is “towards yes”. It appears in the Statement as a formal commitment, describing a pro-growth council using its powers and influence to unlock investment and remove barriers. That is the line applicants will be quoting back for the next four years.
What follows, and when. A Retrofit First statement was promised and should be landing today. Worth being clear what it is: the Retrofit First policy itself is Policy 43, adopted in January under the previous administration as part of the City Plan Partial Review. The new statement is this administration’s guidance, intended to give applicants clarity and confidence rather than to change the policy itself.
Grosvenor’s Jamie Whitty-Lewis and The Crown Estate’s Clare Collard both provided supporting quotes on the day, the latter pointing to joint work transforming Regent Street, Haymarket and Piccadilly Circus. A deliberate show of institutional backing from day one.
Work on a new pro-growth City Plan is already underway, and both feed a Westminster Growth Strategy on a 2040 horizon, pulling economic development, planning, infrastructure, skills and investment into one delivery roadmap. The Statement is explicitly a direction of travel and the opening of a conversation. The Strategy is where the actions get named.
Note the sequencing. Barnes trailed the same vision the day before at the Westminster Property Association’s Planning for Growth in Westminster breakfast on Tuesday 15 September, held at Thirty High, Landsec’s 265,000 sq ft refurbishment of Portland House in Victoria, with a panel chaired by WPA Chair and Grosvenor Property chief executive James Raynor. The event went to a waiting list. Two property audiences in two days. Growth is the message.
Licensing: adopted, and the zone shrinks
Full Council adopted the revised Statement of Licensing Policy on Wednesday. It publishes on 30 September and comes into force on 1 October.
The headline everyone will chase is that the definition of “vertical drinking” survives. The more commercially significant change is the opposite of the summer’s narrative: the West End cumulative impact zone has been reduced, removing significant parts of Covent Garden, Mayfair and the area north of Oxford Street. For operators in those areas the presumption against new licences lifts. That is a genuine liberalisation and it has been almost entirely lost in the noise.
Also changed: the core hours wording now makes clear these are reference points rather than fixed limits, and applications for later hours can still be approved where they promote the licensing objectives. The council will review the policy annually each June and is establishing an expert advisory group.
The consultation drew 690 responses, up from 170 when the policy was last reviewed in 2021. Whatever else the row achieved, it quadrupled engagement with a document almost nobody reads.
The London Assembly also formally condemned the draft policy on 10 September, in a motion moved by James Small-Edwards and seconded by Bassam Mahfouz describing it as a severe threat to the night-time economy of the West End and Soho. Not a Mayoral decision, but it put Westminster on record days before adoption, and the council pressed ahead regardless.
The licensing row goes a round further
Westminster Labour ran a direct attack on the policy on 13 September, calling it a clampdown and bad news for Westminster’s nightlife, continuing the “Bed by 10?” line from July. Barnes did not take it quietly. He invited people to read it and be stunned by the inaccuracies and what he called misleading and malign motivations.
The OSDC makes its entrance
Worth watching how the Oxford Street Development Corporation is choosing to introduce itself, because it now holds the planning powers.
It took its own session at LREF, chaired by Professor Sadie Morgan OBE, with chief executive Nabeel Khan alongside James Raynor of Grosvenor and Lucy Musgrave of Publica. The framing is deliberately broad. Khan’s public reflections afterwards landed on being a good ancestor, on delivery over strategy, and on the argument that London succeeding is not someone else’s job.
Our Political Business interview with Nabeel Khan, Chief Executive of the OSDC is out now, and covers the transformation and the planning powers in more depth. Links below.
Money: now four councils
The funding campaign widened. Richmond has joined Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Wandsworth in a joint letter to government opposing the proposed property tax, with the four framing it as worse than the 1696 window tax.
The visitor levy: 50% or nothing
Swaddle has put a number on it. He is calling on the Mayor to commit to passing at least 50% of any visitor levy revenue to the boroughs that actually deliver the services, and his line is that without a share there will be precisely zero benefit to Westminster residents and businesses.
For context, the City Corporation’s settled position is a 75:25 split between local authorities and the GLA. Westminster is asking for less as a share but on a borough-specific basis. Either way, the argument has moved from whether to have a levy to who banks it, which is where it will stay.
Also worth knowing
Short-Term Lets Taskforce is live. Announced 16 September as the administration ramps up delivery past the 100-day mark, alongside continued work on enforcement, waste and transparency.
Key worker housing plan published. Launched on 15 September across five areas: more key worker homes through the council’s own Regeneration and Development Programme, reform of intermediate allocations, planning changes to increase intermediate supply borough-wide, a relaunched intermediate offer, and lobbying the Mayor so eligibility reflects central London costs. The definition of “key worker” is itself up for review.
The budget consultation is still running. Westminster is asking residents which services matter most, against the £100m funding reduction. More on this in the coming weeks.
The City of London
City Plan 2040: still waiting, and the City’s number has grown
No decision. The inspectors have not reported and there is no published timetable.
What has moved is the Corporation’s own estimate of the cost. Its earlier figure for what Historic England’s alternative contours would remove was around 32,500 sq m of office floorspace. At and around the reopened hearing that rose to up to 92,900 sq m, with one upper viability scenario reported at 106,000 sq m, and modelling extending to 6,800 jobs and £1.2bn of annual GVA. Worth being precise about what those are: scenarios in the Corporation’s own evidence, not floorspace already lost. The higher number is doing a lot of work in the argument.
One important corrective, because it is being reported loosely. UNESCO has not decided to place the Tower of London on the Danger List. Its 2026 decision calls for closer monitoring and refers to possible inscription. It is Historic England that makes the stronger assessment, arguing there is a real risk the Tower could be recommended for the list next year without corrective measures. That distinction matters if you are advising on anything in the Eastern Cluster.
The mechanics are unchanged. Pennycook’s revised direction of 16 July, under section 20(6A), prevents inspectors Bridgwater and Phillips from issuing their report, and confines them to the single comparison. Their findings then go to MHCLG for sign-off. Tower Hamlets’ own local plan examination remains postponed behind it.
Delegation: the clock runs down
The government’s national scheme of delegation takes effect on 31 October, stripping planning authorities of discretion over which applications reach committee, including the ward-councillor call-ins.
The City’s restructuring is on timetable. Members’ preference for a rotating, multiple-panel model, against officer advice for a single dedicated sub-committee, goes to Policy and Resources next Thursday, 25 September, then the Court of Common Council on 8 October, three weeks before the regime bites. If you are bringing something forward in the City after that date, the practical question is whether you can still assume the same members and the same instincts each time. On the rotating model, less so.
Westminster has yet to set out publicly how it will restructure. With six weeks to go, that is worth chasing.
For the record, the London Assembly voted 11 to 7 on 10 September to oppose the reform and asked the Mayor to lobby against it. It changes nothing, but it is a reminder that resistance to the delegation changes is not confined to the authorities losing the power.
New Sheriffs take office on 28 September
Common Hall has elected Alderman Prem Goyal CBE and Alderman The Hon. Tim Levene as Sheriffs of the City of London for 2026–27. They take office on 28 September, succeeding Alderman Robert Hughes-Penney and Deputy Keith Bottomley, and serve for a year.
The Corporation is framing the pairing around business, innovation and public service, with a remit to champion the rule of law and UK competitiveness.
The investment number behind the Budget argument
New data shows investment into the UK reached £4.1 trillion last year, up 5%, with infrastructure, equities and businesses all recording large increases. But the UK’s share of international capital declined.
That combination is precisely the argument the City will be making to the Treasury before 28 October: the absolute numbers are healthy, the competitive position is slipping, and tax decisions taken now determine which of those two trends wins. Expect it quoted in every submission between here and the Budget.
Also out of Guildhall
The Corporation published a report on historic Members’ links to enslaved African people on Thursday, and relaunched its Blue Plaques Scheme the day before. The Lady Mayor was in the ASEAN region making the financial services pitch. And it has approved a new power to remove the Freedom of the City, an honour it has historically been unable to withdraw.
LREF came to Guildhall
The London Real Estate Forum returned to Guildhall on Wednesday, run by New London Architecture, opening with the JLL-led State of the Market session on the Keynote Stage. The politics of the day belonged to Westminster, which used that stage for its Growth Statement rather than its own chamber.