LONDON — One of Britain's wealthiest boroughs is shrinking its workforce. The Conservative-run Westminster City Council is cutting more than 500 jobs, blaming U.K. government reforms for the pressure on its finances, according to local reporting in London this week.
The council, which runs services across the heart of the capital — from Parliament Square to Soho — published its own account of the cuts as the story was picked up by London's local democracy reporters. The scale, more than 500 posts, makes it one of the largest single town-hall reductions announced in the capital this year.
The Westminster news landed in a heavy week for London stories. The Metropolitan Police are running a murder hunt in Enfield after a 35-year-old man was shot dead at a pub on Monday night, releasing a CCTV image of a person linked to the shooting who may have been wearing a disguise, and a man died in a house fire in Willesden on Tuesday morning.
London politics also lost a fixture: Andrew Boff, one of the city's most senior Conservative politicians, quit the party after 53 years, having been blocked from standing for its mayoral nomination, and will sit as an independent London-wide member of the London Assembly.
