Sir Sadiq Khan’s questionable earlier “night czar” has truly begun a working as a marketing consultant known as 24hr Cities – though that London lost swathes of its nightclubs on her watch.
After stepping down last October, Amy Lam é presently supplies herself as a founding supervisor of 24hr Cities on her LinkedIn, calling it a “global consultancy”.
It follows a deeply dissentious interval serving to Sir Sadiq, all through which doubters mentioned Ms Lam é had truly permitted London’s night time life to deteriorate whereas taking house a major revenue.
The New Jersey- birthed Ms Lam é was employed by Sadiq Khan to oversee the expansion of London’s night time financial scenario in 2016. Seen as a noticeable ally of Sadiq Khan at City Hall, she was beforehand a Labour lobbyist and labored as mayoress of Camden.
Her LinkedIn account states: “As the first ever Night Czar for London and the first in the UK, I worked in partnership with stakeholders to ensure that London thrives as a 24-hour city, keeping it vibrant, safe, and diverse from 6pm to 6am.”
However, Ms Lam é was extensively criticised all through her interval for refraining from doing adequate to stem the closure of swathes of bars, bars and eating institutions within the sources.
Approximately 3,000 of London’s nightclubs shut from 2020 to 2023, in keeping with the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), whereas the number of London bars, bars and bars to carry a 24-hour allow dived by larger than 2 thirds in 2023 and 2024 in comparison with the earlier 2 years, happening from 183 to 58 in keeping with a present BBC analysis of Home Office data.
Draconian licensing laws included with skyrocketing bills and clinically depressed buyer investing have truly all been criticized for the lower of London’s night time life, along with the pandemic, which left quite a few friendliness firms defending survival.
Last yr social media websites prospects used up the hashtag ‘LameLondon’ in demonstration, sharing pictures of vacant locations and sparsely-populated roads. “No pints after 22:30. You cannot have any fun. T&Cs apply,” one poster created on X.
Questions have truly likewise been elevated over the revenue paid to Ms Lam é. Though she started making ₤ 32,000-a-year for two and a fifty p.c days perform per week, by the point she surrendered she was being paid a ₤ 132,846 yearly.
Defenders of her doc have truly mentioned that despite the top-level nature of the Night Czar perform, it didn’t have appreciable authority and enforcement powers, and indicated her perform within the resuming of Fabric and safeguarding the way forward for location Printworks.
One sector useful resource said: “I think the problem is that the role is almost an impossible role to do for anybody, whoever you are. The reasons why there are challenges surrounding late nights are not down to one politician or one set of Councilors.”
