Luke Black is the Deputy Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives.
As global inflation grips economies around the world, governments both in the UK and abroad are struggling to meet the demands of various public sector workers.
In France, ticket inspectors on trains walked out – dissatisfied with a 12 per cent pay rise over two years. In the Netherlands, train drivers brought rail to a standstill for three days across the country, rejecting a five per cent pay rise backdated to 2021.
And just last month, the Bank of England itself was struggling to win over its own employees with a three per cent pay rise, telling employees that they needed to ‘do their bit’ to help curb inflation, and to expect lower than desired pay rises at a time of global inflation.
However, you will be hard-pressed to find any public sector workers awarded anything over 20 per cent. In the hours preparing this article, I struggled to find any good examples of public sector officials in the UK, Europe, and USA who had truly inflation-beating pay rises. Except for Amy Lamé.
Yes, that is right, Amy Lamé, the Nightlife Tsar who doesn’t like going out, is set to receive a 40 per cent pay rise this year, bringing her total salary to £116,000. At £116,000, Lamé will be paid more than MPs, select committee chairs, cabinet ministers, headteachers, senior NHS consultants, software engineers, or VPs at Goldman Sachs.
Paid in the past as “Amy Lamé, the individual”, Lamé was on City Hall’s “consultant’s staff” as her services were provided through “Amy Lamé Ltd”. If this arrangement is still in effect, she would even forego income tax on her new salary – taking in 20 per cent more of her earnings as a contractor. Lucky for some.
Whilst you begin to pick your jaw up from the floor, I can’t help but begin to imagine which Key Performance Indicators Lamé has been judged against in her performance review to receive such a generous pay rise.
It cannot be the number of nightlife venues in the capital, which have reduced by 41 per cent whilst she has been in post, according to NTIA data. With just over 220 nightclub venues left open in the capital, down from 381 when Lamé started her role, this is a shocking reduction.
The fall is shown most acutely in the dearth of LGBT+ venues in the capital, now at their fewest in the capital’s history, or in the one in five of London’s bouncers which have left the industry completely.
It also cannot be the number of pubs in the capital, which has declined at a steady rate since Lamé has been in post. Before Covid, from 2016 to 2020, the capital was losing on average one pub a week. During the pandemic this rose to a wholesale 10.5 per cent reduction across the capital, and shows no sign of relenting as the cost of business continues to rocket.
Even the square mile couldn’t escape the inertia and incompetence of Lamé, losing one in seven pubs and bars between 2020 and 2022.
But maybe it is unfair to pin this all on Lamé. Maybe she is just a woman with a desk and a few pens, doggedly defending London’s languishing venues against what the NTIA calls a “perfect storm” of rising costs of business, pandemic debt, landlord pressures, work from home culture and an increasingly hostile licensing environment from local councils.
Yet one quick scroll of her Twitter quickly dispels this, as any evidence of advocacy for the industry is hard to find. There aren’t many photos or posts of her meeting businesses or venues at risk. In fact, there isn’t much to see at all, and freedom of information requests into an average month of her working month quickly confirm.
As per an article I wrote earlier this year for ConservativeHome, an FOI request provided reluctantly to Colm Howard-Lloyd showed Lamé’s diary to be rather threadbare.
Save for meetings with her “personal consultant” and guest appearances with US magazines, there were no meetings with nightclubs, venues, industry groups, hospitality groups, licensing committees, or local councils. There were no meetings with creative industry and no recorded attendance of any nightclubs – yes, there were no records of the so-called ‘nightlife surgeries’ that Khan announced with great fanfare.
Described as “disappointing” and often “non-existent”, tensions came to a head when a consortium of suffering nightlife businesses tried to remove her through a petition to City Hall, citing a failure to be a voice for nightlife at a time of crisis. Even NME, a usually apolitical media outlet, found itself asking: “What is the point of Amy Lamé?”
So, it cannot be her performance. Maybe instead, this pay rise is down to her role as an influential Labour politician? Close friend to the Mayor, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and an unsuccessful Labour Parliamentary candidate, perhaps Lamé had been able to wield her political capital in lobbying Labour-run councils to improve business conditions for nightlife?
Again, this cannot be true. Since she’s been in post, some of London’s worst-offending boroughs for nightlife policy are Labour-controlled. In Labour-run Hackney, al fresco dining and drinking is banned after 10pm. In every new Hackney license awarded, venues are now required to close before 11pm – a bullet for struggling nightclub venues in the borough.
In Labour-run Wandsworth, the locally-adored Northcote Road’s pedestrianisation and al fresco dining, which gave a lifeline to pubs, restaurants, and bars in the pandemic, has been cancelled indefinitely – despite the previous Tory administration finding the funding for it.
In Labour-run Westminster, the hugely popular al fresco dining and drinking remains banned in Soho, restricting businesses on the furniture they can use outside, and forcing them to stop serving outside before 9pm. These are just a few examples.
Instead, Lamé has cashed in the best cheque she can in her performance review, and one of the oldest tricks in the book: being friends with the boss. And as the Mayor announces this week a further ten per cent rise in council tax, on top of a nine per cent increase on the previous year, you may ask yourself – are you better off being friends with Khan too?