A Lot More to Do - Fairer Economy - Westminster Labour Councillors

Our vision for Westminster is as a thriving global city that works for local people led by a council delivering more homes, better jobs and a cleaner, less carbon-intensive environment. Westminster will be a city of mixed and balanced communities where people of all ages live in good homes, have rewarding employment and enjoy a high quality and safe natural and built environment. By supporting economic vitality, celebrating the West End, and leading on climate action, Westminster will be an economically thriving, sustainable, equitable and welcoming place, now and for future generations.

Planning for the future

We will make Westminster one of the fastest and most predictable planning authorities in London, balancing the needs of residents, businesses and builders. Our approach will be clean, transparent and focused on delivering affordable family homes, good jobs, low-carbon construction, green spaces and resilience to heat and heavy rain. We will:

Process applications faster and more efficiently by streamlining and improving the operations of Westminster’s planning service. This includes investing in technology including AI to automate manual tasks such as the PACER tool for managing whole-life carbon assessments.
Make the planning portal searchable by AI agents, implement a chatbot-style search box and include an AI generated one-page non-technical summary of each application lodged on the planning portal.
Produce a live map showing S106 requirements from major planning applications and the progress towards discharging these obligations.
Commit to keep sending out notifications by post to residents living near new applications and support major applications displaying large Canadian-style signs that explain the proposals in non-technical language.
Bring the planning and licensing regimes together, as far as possible to speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy and ensure residents’ voices are heard at every stage.
Ensure that Labour councillors will not accept one-to-one lunches, gifts, tickets, or exclusive entertainment from property developers or their agents. A Labour administration will continue to ensure any discussions with developers about schemes in Westminster are held with relevant officers present. Planning decisions must be shaped by the public interest – not private hospitality.
Maintain the separation of decision making and policy by splitting the roles of Cabinet Member for Planning and Chair of Planning Committee. We will retain the new Westminster Design Review Panel as a key input into planning decisions.

Delivering homes and sustainable growth

Deliver thousands of new homes over the next City Plan period. As part of a full review of the City Plan, we will review design policies to support increased housing delivery in appropriate and sustainable locations, with a focus on affordability.
Provide greater flexibility for the adaptation of existing office buildings to a wider range of uses including residential, hotels, cultural uses and small business workspace. We will create new policies for office to hotel conversion to ensure support for the visitor economy while not impacting the quality of life of people living close by.
Support mixed-use (residential and commercial uses) across the city, especially in the central areas, to ensure the West End continues to be a vibrant and diverse area which maintains a strong residential population. Our City Plan revision will seek to restore ways to enable larger commercial developments to contribute to affordable housing.
Encourage families to start and stay in Westminster by supporting increased delivery of three bedroom homes and discouraging student accommodation. New development should include public realm improvements such as playgrounds, space for recreation and nature and community facilities.
Work to ensure private developers contribute their fair share of affordable housing and lobby the Government and GLA to restore their normal affordable housing requirements as soon as possible.
Support Imperial NHS to build a new St Mary’s Hospital at Paddington.

Climate, retrofit and environmental leadership

Implement the new retrofit first planning policy so that landowners properly consider refurbishing and extending an existing building before we allow redevelopment. Where we do support new buildings, we will impose a carbon budget per square metre of new space linked to a carbon offset payment if developers exceed the target.
Make climate mitigation and adaptation a key design objective with all new buildings being net-zero.
Give clear support for residents to adapt their home and neighbourhoods to improve environmental performance such as community energy systems and storage. We will investigate forming procurement clubs to help private residential blocks save money on retrofitting.
Propose and consult on local development orders that would allow householders to install double glazing without planning permission, provided the new windows are of similar appearance to the current ones. We will work with amenity societies and neighbourhood forums, to ensure the approach works for local areas.
Expand and enhance low-carbon heating and energy infrastructure, encouraging where appropriate the creation of heat networks that can supply many buildings from a single, low-carbon energy source.

Better places and neighbourhoods

Implement a revised Code of Construction Conduct that will make the impact of new development more bearable for residents. We will require developers to give Westminster real-time access to noise/air quality sensors, move construction sites to all-electric by 2030 and mandate ‘green’ hoardings.
Investigate tightening Westminster’s basement policy, to further restrict these environmentally damaging and often socially useless excavations.
Support the work of Neighbourhood Forums in bringing forward local development plans.
Improve the access to, and the environment around, our waterways to create high-quality space for nature and recreation.

Keeping the West End economy humming

We will protect the West End as a global centre for business, arts, culture and nightlife – while ensuring its success supports local jobs, cleaner streets and safer neighbourhoods, in particular for those who live there.

We will support continued investment and sustainable growth in commercial uses in the Central Activities Zone including our two opportunity areas – Paddington and Victoria. We continue to support our two International Centres of West End and Knightsbridge, but will review the boundaries of planning policies and designations to simplify the planning regime and make clear we support supplementing retail with leisure and cultural uses where appropriate. If re-elected we will:

Protect the special character of Soho by encouraging LGBTQ+ venue operators to work closely with the council through the newly formed LGBTQ venue operators forum.
Deliver the Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and Haymarket scheme, the largest public realm transformation in the West End, in partnership with the Crown Estate. The project will create more than six football pitches’ worth of new traffic-free public space on Regent Street St James (Lower Regent Street), while redesigning junctions along Piccadilly Circus and Regent Street itself, to ensure traffic continues to move efficiently.
Investigate feasibility and suitability of new projects where private sector funding is available including the southern end of Charing Cross Road, St George Street, the Arts Quarter, Green Park Station and Portland Place..
Work with telecom operators to improve mobile coverage across the City but particularly in high-traffic locations such as the West End. We will make lamp columns available for cellular telecoms masts, encourage operators to locate new masts on council owned buildings and promote seamless sign-on to public space Wifi networks through Open Roaming..
Lobby the Government to reform business rates to share the burden more equitably between offline and online businesses to reduce the unfair taxation of Westminster’s retail, leisure and hospitality sectors.
Press for the ability to block obvious scams such as snail farms and strengthen the existing work on cracking down on dodgy ‘American Candy’ stores and vape shops that avoid business rates and sell illegal goods.
Continue to support the campaign to reinstate tax-free shopping for tourists.
Work hard to ensure the voices of residents are heard by the new Oxford Street Mayoral Development Corporation and TFL over their plans for the partial pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. Westminster Labour has fought hard to ensure that the traffic still flows freely east of Oxford Circus, protecting Fitzrovia and Soho, and has secured a resident representative on the board of the Development Corporation. CIL and other funds raised by developments on Oxford Street will be retained by the city council. We will work hard to mitigate pressures this scheme may have for local residents and ensure the GLA delivers a scheme that works.
Designate three areas with good transport links and low resident populations as Westminster After Dark Opportunity areas where we will encourage leisure and entertainment uses. These opportunity areas will be Oxford Street, Strand and Victoria Street.
Recognise the value brought by our 20 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). We will continue to work closely with them to ensure Westminster’s business districts remain the engine of economic growth for London and the UK. We will continue to lobby the government to allow electronic voting in BID ballots.
Grow Westminster’s Responsible Business Network, scaling up programmes to help local businesses support local charities. We will run more ‘meet the charity events’ and roll out a new online Community Investment Platform on which charities can post their requirements.
Support the uptake of innovative and low-carbon solutions for freight consolidation, last-mile logistics and business servicing. This includes preparation for eventual robot or drone deliveries.

Supporting our High Streets

Our local high streets are the beating heart of our communities and we have made major investments to help them thrive. If re-elected we will:

Complete our High Streets projects in North Paddington and Paddington/Bayswater and roll-out the programme to Pimlico and other secondary and tertiary high streets across Westminster.
Ensure our High Streets projects will include shopfront improvements, training in visual merchandising and business resilience, supporting traders to set up local business associations or BIDs and the use of High Street Rental Auctions to bring long-vacant sites back into productive use.
Continue the successful Meanwhile On programme, working with landlords to temporarily to activate vacant units bring new and interesting brands to our high streets,
Launch a new Curate On programme – a match-making platform to help landlords of high street shop units find better quality tenants and bring vacant units back into use.
Invest in improving the public realm in high streets across Westminster:
We will improve Westbourne Grove with a new pedestrian crossing at Fiveways Junction and at the junction with Queensway. Where appropriate, we will widen pavements and install new greening.
We will improve Praed Street with wider pavements, more greening and a new public space at the junction with London Street.
We will improve Lupus Street with remodelled crossings, more greening and a shopfront improvement programme.
We will invest in Harrow Road’s high street with improved crossings, decluttering, clearer cycle lanes and better junctions with the side roads.
Develop and invest in our street markets, ensuring that each market has a named officer in charge, traders have access to reasonably priced storage, power and wi-fi where appropriate. We will keep pitch fees low compared to other central London markets.
Open a new workspace at 300 Harrow Road linked to the North Paddington Creative Enterprise Zone and offering below market rent space to local SMEs and maintain Westminster’s network of affordable small-business workspace, including the recent additions at Lisson Arches and Church Street Triangle.
Continue to consult with local communities to decide the best approach for the future of al fresco dining in Westminster. We will continue our street-by-street approach, encouraging it in areas where it can operate successfully with resident support and recognising that some areas, such as particular streets in Soho, have layouts that aren’t suitable for al fresco, and which generated significant problems for the resident and non-hospitality business communities during the pandemic due to issues with crowds forming to drink informally on the street. In areas where the concept has been successfully piloted, such as St Martin’s Lane in the West End, we will move forward with implementation.
Map and support co-operative organisations across Westminster, providing the tools, connections, and networks they need to thrive.
Strengthen commissioning and procurement from cooperative organisations, strengthening the local cooperative economy and keeping wealth within our communities.

Employment and skills

If you grow up in Westminster, you should be able to build a career here. The focus of our employment and skills work will be to give our residents the confidence, skills and connections they need to land the great jobs on their doorstep. Addressing young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs) will be a priority. We also recognise that there may be a new cohort of people made vulnerable by the rise in use of AI to replace office jobs. If reelected we will:

Make a young person guarantee that anyone not in employment, education or training (NEET) will have the opportunity to take a paid work placement.
Build on the work of the Westminster Employment Service, Westminster’s new Education, Employment and Skills Board and the recently created Westminster Anchor Alliance of major employers.
Work closely with employers in real estate, public sector, construction and with council suppliers but widen our reach to include leading employers in technology, finance and media.
Ensure the Westminster Employment Service will continue only placing residents with jobs that pay the London Living Wage.
Work hard to ensure our residents benefit from contractual social value obligations and from S106 employment and skills plans with council suppliers and property developers. We will widen monitoring of social value obligations to include all relevant council suppliers, not just the largest ones.
Leverage the GLA’s London Growth Plan, sector Talent Boards and Pan-London Sector Hubs – notably Paddington Life Sciences – to maximise the benefit for our residents.
Help local people get the best from the new, national employment/skills programmes through the Westminster Employment Service (WES), while protecting WES’s work with adults with learning disabilities.
Recognise the value of the Westminster Adult Education Service, notably sustaining provision of ESOL courses and maximising value from the new Green Skills Centre. We will work with other London boroughs and the GLA to make the case for continued investment in adult education based in local communities.
Work closely with local colleges to guide them to put on the right courses to train local people for the jobs of tomorrow, focusing particularly on Life Sciences, the Creative Sector, Construction and Hospitality.
Help local people make a living (or a business) from their passion for music, arts or culture, building on the work done through the North Paddington Creative Enterprise Zone and including linking up with Hans Zimmer’s new facility at Maida Vale.

A Lot More to Do – Fairer Economy