185. Breakfast with the Lord Mayor, Mansion House, 16 May 2024

As the Master of the Water Conservators, I was invited to a private breakfast with the Lord and Lady Mayoress, Sir Anthony Finkelstein and a small group who are involved with the delivery of the Lord Mayor’s Theme “Connect to Prosper”.  Over breakfast, we were each invited to describe how our respective contributions had worked out.  I spoke about our Coffee Colloquy on UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 Cleaner Water and Sanitation and knowledge mile lectures.  I emphasised the benefits of cross-livery collaboration, the need to exchange knowledge nationally and internationally and tackle water management specifically in partnerships prioritising our use of resources.

Overall we were all pleased.  We did reflect that while there are many initiatives and skills across London, including a very strong science base which is bigger than the finance sector, we tended to be very fragmented with limited cross-sector collaboration.  This was in contrast to smaller cities with a greater sense of coherence, collaboration and a stronger corporate identity.  I discussed the examples of our metropolitan cities with Anthony Finkelstein afterwards and he observed that the City’s world-class academic institutions and Oxford and Cambridge are more likely to think of themselves in isolation and in comparison with their global counterparts like Yale, Princeton or Harvard.  We need to work more on the connections in the City.