James Ford: The Night Czar is dead. But for London’s publicans the Night Mayor has only just begun

James Ford is a columnist for City AM and is a former adviser to Boris Johnson during his tenure as Mayor of London.

The Mayor of London’s dreaded Night Czar is no more. The post has been deleted. Permanently. This should come as no great surprise. The role was an unmitigated failure when occupied by Sadiq’s hapless appointee, Amy Lamé, and the post has sat vacant for more than a year following her resignation. We would probably raise a glass to celebrate this news, but sadly, all the clubs have closed down. (Thanks, Amy!)

Indeed, rejoicing that the Night Czar has gone the way of the Romanovs may be premature. On the recommendation of the Mayor’s Nightlife Taskforce (a committee of industry experts from across the nighttime economy) it is being replaced by a Nightlife Commission (a committee of…wait for it…industry experts from across the nighttime economy). Although the input of genuine business people with real frontline experience must surely be welcomed, it is not clear that City Hall is really taking the Commission, or the nighttime economy, seriously. The Commission has been allocated the rather miserly sum of £300,000 for its initial work, with the intention that it will ultimately become self-funded.

For comparison, £300,000 is what City Hall spent last year promoting al fresco dining. It is equivalent to the combined salary of just two of Sadiq’s nine deputy mayors. It is significantly less than the £958,000 that City Hall spent on providing stewards for the Notting Hill Carnival in 2025. Even more tellingly, £300,000 is slightly less than the total increase in business rates that would have been paid by the three London boozers (the Spread Eagle in Wandsworth, the Beaten Docket in Cricklewood, and the Dog & Bell in Deptford) worst hit by the government’s botched business rates hike prior to the recent screeching U-turn.

Given that the Nightlife Taskforce’s own report found that one in four working Londoners work in the evenings or at night and that the capital’s nighttime economy was worth more than £139bn in 2024, £300,000 now, and an uncertain future funded via GoFundMe and corporate sponsorship, does not really sound like it is going to move the dial much.

Whilst the capital’s overburdened boozers, bars and nightclubs should be concerned (and arguably insulted) that their future has been entrusted to an underfunded, underwhelming City Hall quango with a possibly short lifespan, this is sadly just one example of the indifference that Sadiq Khan’s City Hall has for the hospitality sector.

The sector has faced a torrid time during Khan’s tenure as Mayor. Data from the Night Time Industries Association found that more than 3,000 pubs, bars and nightclubs have closed in London since 2020. In 2024, research by Bonus Finder saw London ranked as the worst city in the UK for a night out because of the prohibitive cost of pints and hotel rooms and the dwindling number of licensed premises per 100,000 population. A further study found that just 24 per cent of all London bars, pubs and clubs were open past midnight on a Saturday night (compared to 44 per cent in Edinburgh and 38 per cent in Manchester). No surprise then that #LameLondon became a popular hashtag prior to Lamé’s departure because of public anger over the lack of late-night options in the capital. Even popular brewing brand Brewdog closed three of its London bars – in Camden, Shepherd’s Bush and Shoreditch – in July 2025. (And you know things must be bad if landlords even struggle to sell overpriced, trendy craft beers to hipsters in Shoreditch of all places).

What has London’s Mayor actually done to help the capital’s struggling hospitality sector during a decade at City Hall? He created the post of Night Czar…but gave it to a Labour Party crony. When clubs and venues continued to close at an accelerated rate, he gave that Night Czar a 40 per cent pay rise. It has taken him nearly a decade in office to get to the point where he has sourced industry recommendations on what the hospitality sector needs.

Was the Mayor one of the many voices that lobbied the Chancellor hard to reverse the business rates rise that licensed premises faced? Nope. Has he spoken out against the national insurance rises that are thought to have destroyed 100,000 jobs in the hospitality sector? Of course not. Is he a critic of the Employment Rights Act or the ‘banter ban’ contained within it? No, in fact he welcomed the legislation.

And it is not like Sadiq to stay quiet on issues of even peripheral relevance to Londoners. He was happy to fly to Los Angeles in 2022 to visit a cannabis farm to make the case for decriminalisation. He never shuts up about Brexit, even though it has been a decade since the referendum. He chose to use his annual keynote address to the City of London (arguably the biggest ‘state of the nation’ moment in the Mayor’s year) recently to warn of the possible dangers posed by AI in the future. But, on the fate of the capital’s historic pubs and the vital jobs they support, our mayor has been conspicuously silent. Other senior Labour figures have had the courage to speak out about the crisis engulfing licensed venues and directly challenge government policy – most notably Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham. But not London’s Mayor.

Where the Mayor has been busy on this issue it is to weaponise the crisis to his own advantage. He has been eager to use the travails of the hospitality sector to acquire new powers for himself. The devolution bill currently meandering its way through Parliament is set to grant City Hall sweeping new powers to call in strategic licensing applications and overrule decisions made by the boroughs. Worse still, he is one of many mayors set to impose a tourism tax on visitors to his city. This is set to clobber tourists visiting the capital to the tune of £350m a year.

All this is despite a lack of evidence that giving Sadiq Khan extra powers will make a positive difference. Afterall, City Hall was granted significant additional planning powers in 2010 but it has not prevented the collapse of housebuilding in London on the current mayor’s watch. And Sadiq Khan has not indicated that he will reinvest any of his tourism tax windfall in initiatives that will boost profits or ease burdens for tourism businesses.

When it comes to taking credit for the achievements of others when things are going well or grabbing additional powers to intervene, Sadiq Khan is always at the front of the queue, enthusiastically shouting “me, me, me”. But, when times are hard and his intervention could make a real difference to Londoner’s livelihoods or quality of life, the mayor is nowhere to be seen or heard. His much-trumpeted existing powers go unused, his high public profile remains unleveraged, and his lack of influence within his own party is vividly exposed. The crisis engulfing the capital’s hospitality industry and destroying essential jobs is not easing up or going away. If anything, it is accelerating. London needs a mayor that will roll his sleeves up and get stuck in or is at least willing to speak out on Londoners’ behalf. It’s a pity that we don’t have one.