The last couple of years have been particularly difficult for businesses across Westminster. Conservative-led Westminster City Council has done everything possible to support businesses and jobs, ensuring that grants and business rate rebates were delivered as smoothly as possible, that one-on-one support was available to those who didn’t qualify for support and that our hospitality, retail and leisure sectors received additional help.
To support the 80,000 jobs in the hospitality sector, the Council granted licences for al-fresco dining to allow restaurants, pubs and cafés the ability to serve customers outdoors, which, after the 2021 lockdown, allowed them to re-open sooner. The Council also recently launched a £1 million scheme to recruit over 200,000 new entrants into hospitality and leisure roles, ensuring that this sector can thrive after the pandemic while providing jobs for our residents.
We widened pavements both to support al-fresco dining and to allow shoppers to feel more comfortable returning to our City and partnered with some of our City’s leading cultural institutions to host ‘Inside Out’, a pioneering outdoor festival to help encourage visitors to return.
We also successfully made the case to national government for bespoke support for our City’s businesses, reflecting their unique cultural significance.
If Westminster Conservatives retain control of our City Council in May, we will continue to work with businesses across all sectors aiding them to recover from COVID and create jobs across our City.
We will:
- Work with businesses of all sizes to support the recovery of the West End in the wake of COVID.
- Invest in local high streets across our City.
- Continue the delivery of our award-winning pop-up programme which supports local entrepreneurs and helps fill empty units on our high streets.
- Facilitate the delivery of skills and training to help people in work living in Westminster into better, higher-paid jobs or to start their own business.
- Provide one-on-one support to help our City’s long-term unemployed and those who have lost their jobs and businesses through the pandemic back into work.
You can find out more about our plan for Westminster by reading our manifesto here.
