- So I wanna show you a next slide, which is,
is another really important indication,
and this is how people feel
about returning to these venues.
Is this something they would rather do
more than before lockdown or less than lockdown?
And again, this might not be a surprise,
but it's a great thing to kind of just fact check
what's going on here.
First of all, we see people
that would want to go to restaurants, before COVID,
they're saying, "I wanna go more than before COVID."
5% of the people, 55% of the people saying,
they wanna go less after this.
So a lot of people are very hesitant
to go out to these venues like restaurants.
Same to large events, even higher percentage are frightened.
55%, don't wanna go out to see large events.
Non-essential shops, again,
for the things that you don't have to go get
still a high level of fear,
45% of the people,
would rather not go to these shops compared to before,
and we see at sports facilities,
visiting families and friends,
using public transport, look at that,
almost 60% of the people,
are scared to use public transport.
Another massive problem,
which what I wanna talk about in the second point here.
And then finally, visiting the cultural centres,
I'll spin around here, again, museums, etc.
I took my son to the Science Museum this Sunday,
nobody there, there was just no one there.
And no one's visiting these cultural centres,
which means again, no employment there,
and they're not actually used to,
or they're not prepared for what potentially happens
if we have tourists.
So again, more indications with real data,
that people are super hesitant to go there.
And that's because the campaign of fear,
really was overdone.
And I wanna get to this point a little bit more.
Let me show you one more graph
that I think is really relevant here.
And this talks about the rates of growth,
by quarter of various countries from around the world.
And I think it's really important
to put this in perspective,
and compare the UK to other G-7 countries.
So again, here you have the UK,
and just to give you an idea,
the blue is the first quarter,
which was basically kind of pre-COVID okay,
the last bit of it, that was a bit of a concern in lockdown.
The red is the second quarter,
and of course the green is the combination of two, the half.
So as you would expect with most major economies
and I've got the UK, France, Germany, Spain, USA,
and we put in China as well,
pre-COVID or as it start to happening,
we saw kind of a small drop in,
in some of the growth here.
But of course in the second quarter we saw massive drops.
And again, you see the UK really
topping out the chart almost at a 20% drop
in the GDP in the second quarter,
I mean, that's massive.
We saw a little bit less so in France,
a little bit less so in Germany,
Spain, a little bit less, but still the same,
the US hasn't dropped as much,
and you see with China,
they almost recovered in the second quarter,
because they were managed to squash that
in the very beginning,
to where they really didn't have that knock on.
So it shows that it didn't happen
everywhere around the globe,
but the most important thing I want you to look at here,
is the fact that Germany,
is now only experiencing in the second quarter say,
just above a 10% drop in GDP,
whereas the UK is at 20%.
Some of these countries like Germany and France
are finding ways to get back to growth.
They're finding ways to get people back to work.
And what they're doing better than we're doing,
is they're getting people back into the cities
and back into the offices,
because this is the key to economic growth.
And I think there was a study we saw recently
that said two thirds of the workers
have returned to the offices in the cities of Germany,
whereas in London, it's more like a third or less.
And I think this is one of the biggest problems,
that we're having here,
and it's to have massive effects.
And the problem with graphs like this is that,
some of these businesses are dying.
These small and medium-sized businesses
are going bankrupt and they will never return again.
And if you walk around London
or walk around the cities you're in,
you see these boarded up stores.
Those stores are not coming back,
they're not taking a break,
'cause they don't have the capital reserves to wait it out.
And so we are seeing so much innovation,
so much capital being destroyed.
And let's be clear, it's 99% of the London economy,
and the employment in London,
is from small and medium-sized businesses.
It's that high.
And for us to not realise that it's really important,
the multinational companies,
the ones on the S&P 500 Index, and the FTSE 100,
they might survive,
but that's not the lifeblood of our city,
and that's not where most of our employment comes from.
And I actually went out in the field yesterday,
and have a conversation with
a gentlemen I know named James Dawson,
who owns something called the Humble Grape.
He set this company up about 10 years ago,
because he loved wine.
And it ended up turning from a wine tasting event company
into actually a wine bar business,
with five locations around the city,
from places like Canary Wharf, where financial district is,
to places like Battersea and paste places like Clapham,
where there's actual some real economic activity.
And so I actually went out and spoke to James
at his wine bar, and I talked a little bit about
how we can get Londoners back to work,
and here's a short piece of my conversation with him.
Yeah, I mean, I think the stat that I saw was 42% of
the income in London comes from the workers of London,
and a lot of them are here,
and these businesses are dying,
and it's something nobody talks about,
is the irreparable economic damage being done.
We were talking earlier, every single day this goes on,
businesses are going out of business forever,
and they're never gonna come back.
And these are these big holes in the economy
that are gonna affect everybody.
And when the business isn't there,
then all the ancillary people they employ aren't there,
and this is something that just doesn't seem
to be very well thought out,
and our leadership isn't saying,
"Hey, let's get this city bustling again."
It all seems to be the latest fear monitor.
And I understand we need to trust the science and be safe,
but also, the economic is really significant,
and you're feeling this too.
- Yeah, we're feeling this,
I mean, we used to be open here,
Monday to Friday, breakfast, lunch and dinner,
and now we open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evening only.
Our revenue is 80% less than it was pre-COVID.
It's a big building, and has a lot staff,
we're on four staff now,
we were on 16 before,
and sometimes we got up to 20 Christmas time.
Well, we must've forget that,
one of the things that's really exciting
and interesting about London and the UK is that,
huge, huge amount of employment is by small businesses,
between zero and 50 employees,
it's a huge chunk, and those businesses are
not able to survive six, 12 months
with massively reduced cash flows.
They are the engine of growth in the UK,
and we need to find ways to help them
and encourage people back to work,
encourage people to be expecting to come back.
- And so again, I think it's really important
to get out and actually speak with the entrepreneurs
out there and get their thoughts.
And I had a really long conversation with James,
I put it on YouTube yesterday, about 20 minutes long,
we talked to him about everything
from furlough, to government regulations,
to ideas about actually getting workers back into the city,
and that's what's really important.
I'm getting some great questions,
from everyone out here,
a lot of people are saying,
there's a Miata on Instagram saying,
"The government wants to make
"life for small business owners, as hard as possible."
All I know is that, it is having that effect.
The problem is that the small
and medium-sized business owners,
who don't have a lot of capital,
who don't have the reserves,
who don't have access to the public equity markets
are really getting squeezed now.
And we forget how much they are,
the lifeblood of the city,
and it's important to really look out for them,
because they're the ones that employ the people,
that are our friends and family.
And so it's really crucial here.
Also, somebody said, "It's time to start holding
"our governments more accountable."
And that's true.
I was really slow to start talking about because,
we're usually broadcasting the messages
that we like to put out to you,
to really get you to change your lives,
but it's time to really talk about
how to get London back to work.
And then that's what I wanna talk about now.
And so, one of the things that I think,
that we need to talk about the real problems here,
is there three things.
The first problem is that,
the government overdid the campaign of fear,
and it was a disproportionate response.
We scared everyone so much,
that now you can't get people back to work,
back in the city, back to using public transportation,
back into the schools.
And so what I really want,
is I want to introduce science-based decision making,
back into the process.
And that's the problem, there isn't any science right now.
There's a horrible lack of leadership from our government,
there's a lack of communication,
and there's inconsistent messaging from our government.
We see it from the mayor of London,
we see it from other people as well,
we just don't see a consistent message here,
and we don't see the science,
that's actually there, to tell us
what we can and cannot do,
when it comes to our transport,
when it comes to how we communicate,
when it comes to our business practises.
And that's the biggest change that we need.