Dear Londoners — over the last few weeks, we’ve been trawling through the minutes of committee meetings and financial statements, visiting university campuses and speaking to former staff and industry experts to bring you today’s story. It’s an investigation into the Royal Docks Centre for Sustainability, a project at the University of East London backed by a £1.6mn grant from City Hall that promised to create hundreds of green jobs across Newham and help London meet “the needs of the next industrial revolution”. The only problem? It won that money, a record for a London university, 11 months after it hired the mayor’s wife. And what’s more, 18 months after launching, it’s only created 14 new jobs.
First, here’s your London in brief:
🤖 Despite a stirring introduction from the prime minister, who hailed the event as “hugely, hugely important”, London Tech Week 2025 got off to a rocky start after an entrepreneur was turned away for bringing her eight-month-old baby along. Davina Schonle travelled for three hours to attend the event, only to be forced to leave by organisers — not a great look, considering the accusations of sexism that continue to dog the tech sector.
🤠 Despite being one of the biggest stars on the planet, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour failed to sell out on any of its six nights at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Five hundred tickets remained unsold just hours before the first show was set to begin. But there's a silver lining, with some reportedly distributed to low income families via food banks.
🏡 According to reports, the shrinking number of international buyers, deterred by new non-dom tax rules, have led to large price drops in London’s luxury housing market. This is being seized upon by UK families, who are increasingly buying up expensive housing in prime postcodes. “There’s definitely people eyeing family houses in Belgravia that they can now buy at less than £2,000 per square feet,” Stuart Bailey, head of prime central London sales at Knight Frank, told the FT, “which was not possible a few years ago”.
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It’s rare for any London project to receive a more glowing endorsement than the one given by Sadiq Khan at the launch of the Royal Docks Centre for Sustainability (RDCS) in December 2023. A new project from the University of East London (UEL), the £5mn development promised to bring hundreds of green jobs and support the mayor’s efforts to rejuvenate the old Docklands in Newham, where City Hall itself moved in 2022. “The RDCS embodies our city's direction of travel,” Khan told onlookers. “This centre is now integral to one of the most significant regeneration projects in Britain and will help drive the entire venture forward over the coming decades, delivering good, inclusive growth as well as well-paid, high-skilled, meaningful jobs for East Londoners.”
If you weren’t looking carefully, it would’ve been easy to miss how closely City Hall and the mayor himself are involved with RDCS and UEL. The press release about the event mentions the city’s financial support for RDCS, but not the amount: £1.6mn, the largest grant to a university in at least the last five years, approved 11 months after UEL hired Saadiya Ahmad, the mayor’s wife, to run its legal advice centre. She was subsequently promoted multiple times, and is now the associate dean in charge of careers and enterprise at the university. In January this year, UEL awarded the mayor himself an honourary doctorate.
The £1.6mn subsidy promised to turn a mostly unused university building opposite London City Airport into a “regional hatchery for innovation, skills and enterprise” that would help make East London into a hub for green start-ups and create over 400 new jobs in five years. But over a year and a half after its launch, despite ongoing endorsements from the mayor’s office, the RDCS seems to have fallen short of its promised potential. The number of jobs directly created so far, according to UEL and City Hall: 14.
City Hall claims Khan played no role in the grant award, which was approved by the city’s housing and land directorate. Ahmad did not respond to a request for comment. But the saga raises questions about why UEL was able to win such a generous grant for a project that looks unlikely to deliver the hundreds of green jobs it promised for East London.
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