Lime is making big money from e-bikes
Plus: Who is going to be the Conservatives' mayoral candidate as one potential runner rules themselves out for being "too fat" — and will the Tesco ramraider please collect their car?
As I said last week, sometimes you need to leave London to find out what’s going on in the capital. I’m writing this in Manchester, where I’ve been combining an investigation into a Lancastrian businessman who has substantial interests in London (and one of the wildest stories I’ve ever reported on) with a visit to the Conservatives’ annual party conference.
Read on to find out who is the favourite to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate — or scroll to the end to see just how much money Lime is making from its e-bikes.
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Who’s going to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate?
Last week we reported on the race to be Labour’s mayoral candidate, who will become the immediate favourite to end up in City Hall. Any Conservative running for mayor of London in 2028 will be starting with the expectation that they will lose, given the current state of the party’s polling in the capital. Their situation is made worse by Labour changing the voting system back to the old supplementary vote method in a move that should favour the party’s as-yet-unchosen candidate.
All of this means the Conservatives need to find someone the public have heard of who wants to give up years of their life on a potentially-fruitless-but-profile-raising campaign just to have an outside shot of taking over City Hall from Sadiq Khan. But given the state of their Westminster party (and the route to Downing Street of previous Conservative mayor Boris Johnson), there were a few names who were no doubt happy to be discussed as potential candidates in the conference bars.
The most obvious candidate is James Cleverly, the man who might have been Conservative Party leader if his MP supporters hadn’t tried to be a bit too clever in the final round of voting by backing Badenoch in a game of 3D political chess that ultimately knocked their guy out. Returned to the frontbencher as Conservative shadow housing secretary, he’s a former London Assembly Member who now represents Braintree, a constituency that’s just about in the capital’s Essex commuter belt.
“It’s a really, really important job,” he told the BBC’s Newcast on Tuesday night. “My heart is in Essex, but… watching London go wrong angers me enormously. I‘d be stupid not to think about it, but I say my heart’s in Essex.”
He’s well-positioned for a run at the top London job but a lot depends on whether he’s got the opportunity for another go at being Conservative leader if (or when) Kemi Badenoch is deposed. At some point he’ll have to choose which job to prioritise.
Former MP Penny Mordaunt was seen as a potential candidate but has dropped off the London local media radar in recent months. Other chatter at the Tory conference was around two former Olympians. One is Sebastian Coe, who was a Conservative MP before running the successful London 2012 Olympics, and then an unsuccessful attempt to lead the International Olympic Committee. He would have instant name recognition but he might not want to take on a potentially hopeless cause.
The other is the Times columnist and former table tennis champion Matthew Syed, a former Labour parliamentary candidate. He recently and very publicly announced he was joining the Conservatives on the basis that Kemi Badenoch is the “only leader starting to glimpse the truth” on the state of the economy. Syed didn’t return a request for comment on conference speculation that he’d been discussing the job.
Another place to look is the Conservative members of the London Assembly. Former candidate Susan Hall could be up for another run despite her last troubled bid and involvement in an organisation that wants mass deportations of many Londoners who are legally resident in the capital. Fellow assembly member Neil Garratt is likely to be tempted. Longstanding Tory assembly member Andrew Boff told us he’d definitely be putting his name forward to be mayor. Boff also said he wanted Kemi Badenoch to quit as leader because “she’s not very good”, a view he said is shared by “most of the people in the party”.
His assembly colleague Thomas Turrell told a London Councils fringe event that he wouldn’t be running because he’s “too fat to be mayor” and said he’d have to “talk to Robert Jenrick” for Ozempic tips but wants Cleverly to “man up” and go for the job.
Talking of Kemi Badenoch, she gave an interview to ITV London’s Simon Harris ahead of the party conference. She was asked who she wanted to run for mayor but the clip didn’t make it to air — so Harris shared it with London Centric.
“The ideal candidate is someone who is a beacon of hope and light in our city,” she said. “We do not have someone [referring to Sadiq Khan] who is bringing the city together. We need someone who understands the economy and has had a proper job and who can show private sector experience. We need someone who is business-friendly who can tackle issues like knife crime and show our city at its best. I’m looking for people to come forward – we are the Conservative party and we believe in meritocracy and open competition.”
Asked if she’d consider running for mayor if deposed as leader, she told Harris: “I’m only interested in doing one thing which is getting Labour out of government and making sure Reform does not get in.”
Will the person who won’t stop driving into this east London Tesco please collect their car?
Still no news on the mystery of the Tesco on Stratford High Street, east London, that was repeatedly attacked in the middle of the night. A mystery driver kept ramming cars into its windows, before fleeing without stealing anything. You can read our original report here.
Local MP Uma Kumaran told us the police are pursuing “several lines of enquiry” and had pledged to add extra patrols in the vicinity of the store to tackle anti-social behaviour.
A month after the most recent attack the supermarket remains closed. More curiously, the car that was used in the incident remains abandoned on the pavement outside, with no one taking responsibility for moving it.
One local resident sent us a photo of it noting that the local traffic warden is continuing to meet their performance targets by adding more parking tickets to its windscreen.
A phone theft victim does the legwork to lead the Met to an organised crime gang.
You might have seen this week’s coverage of the phone theft gang that was smashed by the Met police. The police said the gang may have shipped 40,000 stolen phones from the UK to China, around 40% of all the devices reported stolen in the capital in a given year.
The only embarrassing thing for the Met is that their mega investigation seems to have been prompted by a member of the public using Apple’s Find My feature to track their iPhone to a warehouse near Heathrow, where they alerted security to a large box of stolen phones, who in turn eventually got the police to take it seriously. Whether the gang would have been found out without that enterprising member of the public doing their own detective work is unknown, although it shows that a basic bit of legwork can make the difference.
Our report in March detailed how phones wrapped in tinfoil are being shipped abroad in bulk to Algeria and Hong Kong by organised gangs. If you make the locked devices worthless by shutting down the bulk export market you could quite quickly take away the incentive for thieves to zoom down on Oxford Street on an illegal electric bike swiping devices. The first step towards this could be actively tracking down all those Find My pings from stolen phones and seeing where they ended up in the capital.
How Lime is earning a load of money from London e-bike rentals.
Lime has just published its annual financial return for the UK — and it shows how rental e-bikes are now huge business, as the Uber-backed tech company tries to grow as fast as possible ahead of a planned listing on the stock market.
The company’s latest accounts reveal that revenue from renting out scooters and e-bikes in the UK jumped by 75% in just a year to more than £111m in 2024. This is no longer a small start-up but a financial juggernaut.
The financial records cover all of Lime’s British operations, including London’s e-bikes and scooters as well as Nottingham, Salford, Milton Keynes, and Oxford. But given Lime’s operations in those cities are a fraction of the size of its London business, the vast majority of its £111m revenue is likely to be coming from Londoners.
These financial figures came before this summer’s spike in usage of Lime e-bikes, which was turbocharged by the tube strike introducing them to many people for the first time. As a result Lime is likely to be well on the way to being a £200m-a-year business in the UK, becoming one of the biggest private transport operators in the capital.
This also means that Lime dwarfs Transport for London’s in-house Santander Cycles rental scheme, which only brought in revenue of £10m last year, as well as much smaller e-bike competitors such as London-only Forest.
Lime’s annual accounts are one of the few insights we have into the scale of Lime’s London business, given it is not regulated in any meaningful sense and barely shares any information about its operations. This has led to difficulties for journalist and politicians who want to get answers around everything from bad parking, the scale of “Lime bike leg” injuries in NHS hospitals, and how many Londoners now use and enjoy them daily.
We don’t even know roughly how many Lime bikes are in the capital. A recent freedom of information request by London Centric asked whether Transport for London even has any estimates of how many e-bikes it is operating in the capital. The transport authority replied: “We do not hold any additional data and we have not created any estimates of our own on the number of dockless e-bikes in London. TfL does not regulate, manage or operate any of the dockless e-bike rental schemes in London and has no powers to do so.”
Lime itself only directly employs 39 people in the UK, even though it pays for hundreds of contractors to retrieve, recharge, and repair its vehicles around the capital.
The UK business recorded a profit of £1.7m, although its true performance is obscured by substantial internal “reseller payments” to its parent company. It ended the year with around £50m of e-bikes and scooters on its books, although they have rapidly depreciated in value after encountering London’s streets.
All of this suggests the UK is responsible for around a sixth of the Lime’s global revenues — showing the importance of London to the company’s financial performance. This means that anything that threatens Lime’s in London, such as increased regulation, could cause big problems for Lime and its investors ahead of a stock market listing — giving London’s councils more leverage than they might realise.
Some boroughs are starting to cotton on to this and starting to demand payments from Lime. In Hackney the council has negotiated a revenue-sharing deal with Lime, which estimates that the borough’s rental e-bike market could be worth more than £90m over the next five years.
Kensington and Chelsea council leader Elizabeth Campbell also told the Conservative Party conference her council has opened up a new revenue stream by seizing badly parked e-bikes in west London: “We impound them and Lime have to pay us. We’ve fined Lime £50,000 over the last two weeks which is pretty good.”
You can re-read a piece twenty times yet still send it out with a line describing Lime as “one of the biggest pirate transport operators" in the capital, rather than a "private transport operator". That's been fixed, with thanks to the readers who enjoyed spotting it!
Regarding the organised phone stealing… I was in London a few months ago and stopped for a bit of peace and quiet in a small community garden behind Tottenham Court Road - Phoenix Park I think it’s called… anyway I found a phone there and then got talking to a woman who lived in the flats overlooking the park. She said the thieves dump the phones in the bushes there throughout the day and come back for them at the end of the day in case they are arrested (they don’t want to be arrested with loads of phones on them). (I managed to reunite the phone with its owner.)