Market Update: We break down the business implications, market impact, and expert insights related to Market Update: Lambeth serves up night-time economy plans, but Brixton businesses want meat on the bone – Full Analysis.
Lambeth Council has unveiled its first-ever Night-Time Economy Strategy, setting out a package of measures aimed at revitalising the borough after dark and supporting businesses operating between 6pm and 6am. Central to the plan is a pilot network of late-night hubs, beginning in Brixton, offering safe spaces for people feeling vulnerable, alongside proposals for separate hubs providing basic facilities for gig economy workers, including shelter, toilets and charging points.
The strategy also outlines ambitions to revive town centres at night through expanded al-fresco dining, High Street Rental Auctions to bring empty units back into use, and stronger protections for grassroots music and cultural venues via planning and licensing policy, including the ‘Agent of Change’ principle, which protects existing venues from noise complaints by new developments.
Council leaders have framed the initiative as part of a broader effort to make Lambeth “London’s safest night out”, while recognising the night-time economy as a major employer and a cornerstone of the borough’s cultural identity.
Lambeth’s announcement comes as part of a coordinated national push, following polling suggesting the visible decline of high streets and town centres is emerging as a serious electoral risk for Labour. This week, Treasury minister Dan Tomlinson announced a 15% business rates discount for pubs, worth around £1,650 a year for the average venue, after backlash over November’s Budget, which left many hospitality businesses facing sharp rises and prompted more than a thousand pubs to ban Labour MPs in protest.
For Mario Schifano, owner of long-standing Brixton café-bar San Marino, Lambeth’s plans are welcome – but only as a starting point. Having traded in Brixton since 1993, he says the cumulative impact of Covid, Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis has left both customers and businesses stretched thin.
“If the man on the street doesn’t have any money, then the businesses are gonna suffer,” – San Marino owner Mario Schifano
A 15% business rates cut is “better than nothing”, Mario adds, but the optics don’t yet match the reality on the ground. Crime and antisocial behaviour remain his biggest concern, deterring visitors, and their friends and families, from returning. He also points to the temporary closure of Brixton Academy as exposing just how fragile Brixton’s night-time economy has become, with the loss of a single major venue rippling across surrounding bars, cafés and restaurants.
Brixton, Mario believes, is on the mend – but still precarious.
For Jennie Labbett Kelleher, co-owner of Off The Cuff, currently refurbishing ahead of a relaunch as The Cuff London, the glass is definitely half full.
After more than a decade operating hospitality businesses in Brixton, she says Lambeth’s night-time plans feel like more than just another announcement. “After everything the sector has been through, it finally feels like hospitality is being taken seriously again,” she says.
Jennie welcomes the renewed focus on evening trade and late-night safety, particularly for staff travelling home in the early hours. While rising costs and staffing pressures remain, she says the sense of backing matters when deciding whether to reinvest, hire locally and commit to Brixton’s future.
However for Hammant Patel Villa, owner of Supercute Brewery and formerly of Courtesan, Lambeth’s night-time strategy feels less like a vision and more like window dressing. Having attended the launch event at Electric Brixton, he says much of what was presented reflected ideas long discussed, but rarely delivered.
“A lot of it has been bandied around for some years, but what that strategy is, what the manifesto is, what the actual action items are – we don’t know.” – Hammant Patel Villa, Supercute Brewery
Hammant questioned each proposal in turn. On plans for new night hubs and facilities, he points to basic infrastructure already in place but left unused. Referring to the long-closed public toilets near Windrush Square, he asks:
“If we’ve got those facilities ready, just open them. So why are we making a hullabaloo about something we could do tomorrow morning?”- Hammant Patel Villa, Supercute Brewery
When it comes to protecting grassroots culture, Hammant questions how broadly that protection will be applied. “What is the structure for all venues, not just the ones that you love or might attend?” he asks, pointing to the loss of long-established venues such as the Dogstar as evidence that protection in principle has not translated into security in practice.
For Hammant, there’s a risk the strategy remains words rather than action. “Is it serious fundraising,” he asks, “or is this an exercise of minimalism – so it looks like we’re doing good?”
Beyond the strategy itself, Hammant widens the lens to pressures now plainly visible across Brixton: shuttered venues, empty units and a night-time economy struggling to break even. For him, rent is where abstract policy failures become brutally concrete.
At Courtesan, a sharp rent rise combined with escalating rates ultimately made the business unviable. “The Courtesan faced a 50% rate increase plus a five-year rent review,” he says. “In what world does that make any sense when all those businesses around you have closed?”
Taken together, Hammant argues that business rates, VAT, National Insurance rises and landlord expectations now combine to squeeze small operators while offering little in return. “Rates are a tax for businesses,” he adds. “Often for nothing. You don’t get your waste, you don’t get cleanliness, you don’t get anything. It’s like just for existing.”
While the shopping basket of Lambeth’s night-time initiative might appear to have all the right ingredients, the lived experience of business owners tells a tougher story. Whether what’s currently on offer can provide a substantial meal remains to be seen.
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While on the surface national and local measures appear well-founded, they run up against a basic reality: without money in people’s pockets, there can be no revival of the high street. Strategy cannot substitute for disposable income, particularly when visible homelessness and safety concerns continue to shape how people experience town centres.
At a wider level, government policy continues to refuse a meaningful shift in economic burden, away from everyday people and small independent businesses, and towards the billionaire and corporate giants who have emerged not only untouched from years of crisis, but sitting on more wealth in the history of the planet. Don’t get me started on Amazon sucking the high streets dry!
How difficult would it be to reduce business rates for small independents while increasing them for companies posting multi-billion-pound profits? Or to raise the income tax threshold to £20,000, immediately boosting take-home pay, and offset it by introducing higher taxes further up the food chain? Removing VAT from more food and drink essentials while increasing it on luxury consumption, jets, yachts, supercars, would be another straightforward redistribution.
The same logic applies to utilities. Nationalising water and energy generation is the corrective response to decades of extraction, under-investment and public harm.
The uncomfortable truth is this: the Conservatives have pillaged the foundations of the economy, while Labour appears willing only to tinker at the edges of reform. At local level, flagship boroughs like Lambeth do not operate in isolation, they move in step with national party priorities and limits.
Labour membership remains full of committed working-class and middle-class people who believe in fairness. But redistributive ideology, real redistribution, no longer exists in any meaningful form at the top. Until it does, strategies will remain light on substance, and revival will simply remain an electoral talking point.
The question is: will a significant vote for Greens, Lib Dems and independents at May’s local elections send a strong enough signal to Labour that tinkering at the edges of inequality doesn’t put pies on plates.