The London Evri drivers getting pre-Xmas pay cuts

If you’re still looking for a last-minute Christmas present for someone then a gift London Centric subscription, at our discounted entry-level rate could fit the bill.

If you want a physical London Centric gift card to hand over in person then there’s still (just about) time to receive one via first class post. Or, for the second year running, I’ll be delivering late orders by hand to any address in Zones 1-3 on Christmas Eve.

At the start of this month a London Centric reader got in touch to say they’d just been talking to their local Evri courier in the capital, who had their pay cut significantly just before the Christmas delivery rush. What we discovered was not a blanket policy but an ad-hoc targeting of individual drivers.

Scroll down to read how much your local Evri courier really earns per package — and how the company pushes down individual drivers’ pay if it becomes ”higher than what we believe is fair”.

Hampstead Heath’s independent cafes replaced by Daisy Green, posing the question: When is a chain not a chain?

It’s always worth seeing which announcements are snuck out just before Christmas when people aren’t paying attention. The City of London’s long-awaited review of the cafes in its north London parks was announced on Friday afternoon, just when many people were starting to put on their out-of-office notifications.

The top line is that the existing independent cafe operators in Parliament Hill Fields, Parliament Hill Lido, Golders Hill Park, and Queen’s Park will lose their businesses, with the leases on the properties transferred to the Australian cafe operator Daisy Green. A decision on the future of the Highgate Wood cafe will be announced in due course.

Back in the summer, the City launched a surprise “competitive re-marketing process” for the cafe units, prompting sustained community pushback from the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch and James MacAvoy. The corporation’s plans to increase the money it makes from its green spaces across the capital had been leaked to London Centric earlier in the year..

Stefan Simanowitz, who tried to save the existing cafes, said local campaigners intended to fight this week’s decision: “It would be tragic if our local family-run cafes, operated by people who live in the community, were replaced with Daisy Green, a high-end chain.”

Anticipating this criticism, the City is going out of its way to emphasise in ...