So long as the staff are working effectively from home a couple of days a week, you might as well save on the rent. Shareholders certainly won’t be upset about that. Plenty of other banks, lawyers and accountants are reported to be subletting space they don’t need, or looking again at their leases to see if they can move to somewhere smaller and cheaper. Meanwhile, it is hard to see that Credit Suisse will need nearly so much space, given that following its takeover of the Swiss bank UBS is busily sacking staff. It follows a similar decision by Clifford Chance late last year. With far fewer staff required in the office five days a week, and perhaps with an eye on splitting its British and European operations out from its huge business in China, HSBC simply doesn’t need the space any more. HSBC announced last week that it would be handing back the keys to its 45-storey tower in the business district, and moving its global headquarters to smaller offices close to St Paul’s Cathedral before its lease expires in 2027. It was perhaps the worst news that owners of Canary Wharf, the Qatar Investment Authority and the Canadian private equity firm Brookfield, could have had. And yet once a few key tenants leave, great commercial districts can quickly turn into ghost towns.įrom accelerated rezoning to lowering business rates, to perhaps even turning them into low-tax enterprise zones, we need a plan to rescue not just Canary Wharf but many other business centres across the country – because if we don’t act decisively, and quickly, it will soon be too late. Hybrid working looks to be here to stay, and no one is going to need the same amount of towering floor space they once did. We can understand those decisions from a purely commercial point of view. It is only a few months since the law firm Clifford Chance announced a similar move back into the traditional heart of London. The UK’s only genuinely global financial institution this week decided that it would leave London’s docklands and move to a small space in the City.Īt the very least it will be a shorter walk if it needs five-star legal advice. And yet very soon, it will disappear from Canary Wharf for good. Alongside the Citibank building and the massive Barclays headquarters, the HSBC logo is a familiar part of the east London skyline.
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