Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/06/18/london_tech_week_a_fraud_by_luvvies_and_the_jokes_on_you/

London Tech Week: All for the luvvies and the joke's on you, taxpayers

It's total nonsense - yet we're the ones funding it

By Andrew Orlowski

Posted in Legal, 18th June 2014 08:06 GMT

+Comment Yesterday morning I was on a stage listening to the Deputy Mayor of London and trying very hard not to look out of the window.

I was the 39th floor of One Canada Square (you know, the building everyone always calls “Canary Wharf”), which had a great view over North London. If only I could sneak a peek, I was sure I'd be able to spot a local landmark.

The speaker was actually one of the six (count 'em) Deputy Mayors of London, Munira Mirza, a sociology PhD who gets paid £129,082 a year to advise Boris Johnson on culture and education matters.

Ms. Mirza, a career waffle-shop hopper (Royal Society for the Arts, Arts Council, etc), had something extraordinary to say to the audience, who were teenagers drawn from local schools. They were there because they hope to get jobs in journalism which nobody expects will exist. And if they do exist, they won't be open to inner-city teenagers.

London used to be known for its finance businesses, the deputy mayor told them, but now it was one of the biggest and best "technology centres" in the world - if not the most bestest of all! Technology was "driving" London's employment growth. Having explained this, Mirza sat down looking extremely pleased with herself. As you would, too, if you were paid almost as much as the Prime Minister.

The event was independently organised but had been sucked into “London Technology Week”, which itself hoovers up large sums of public funding ostensibly to stimulate the local economy. But in reality (as we shall see) it really benefits people who put on events like “London Technology Week”. It also enriches speculators, hangers on, carnival barkers: the pick-and-shovel merchants of the bubble, who rent space in "incubators", offer "mentoring" and put on endless events. The “London Tech Scene” was created by and for political, marketing and media types. The gap between these elites and the rest of the UK was illustrated by the enthusiastic youngsters who'll never get within breathing distance of their dream job.

The reality of the London's “Tech Scene” (yeah, I know) was inadvertently illustrated by three reports that accompanied its launch yesterday. One claimed that London now had more "tech jobs" than Silicon Valley. The “Scene” was actually pulling the UK out of recession: 27 per cent of new jobs in the UK were "tech jobs", apparently. That's 438,000 new tech jobs. The job numbers were was quickly debunked by Sky's Ed Conway and Tom Cheshire.

Estate agents have provided more jobs than the "tech" sector - despite UK.gov cooking the books

"Look closer, and you'll notice many push the definition of what we understand as a tech company," explained Cheshire, who spotted that TV production company Endemol in Shepherd's Bush was counted as a tech company. So too, we must add, is "Croydon Tech City" - another quango. So much for Shoreditch. The list included China Mobile, Facebook and BuzzFeed, and fewer than a third of the 97 firms cited were UK companies. So much for UK startups.

In a longer analysis, Ed Conway explained the fraud that "tech" was driving growth. Conway's analysis is fascinating, and actually explains where the jobs are being created.

As I pointed out last December, the definition of “tech” has been expanded enormously. Retailers are now tech businesses. The Bank of England is a tech business. So is Boots the chemist. We can thank the out-of-control Cabinet Office - the people behind the Government Digital Service (GDS) and Lily Cole's wishing well - for this.

The GDS also paid (with your money) for the dubious new index, and declared at the time: "The new index is more representative of companies operating in the sector with weightings in key service areas such as travel and leisure, media and general retailers as well as traditional software and technology stocks".

However, this makes claims made for tech worthless.

The jobs growth was actually services-led, and much of this was servicing property and retail. On closer examination the job figures also include management consultancy and office admin roles.

Nor was it "startup led", as the luvvies' fantasy would maintain. Jobs classified as “activities of head offices; management consultancy”, have increased by 42 per cent since 2009.

In fact, if we're to interpret the SIC codes honestly, real estate sales (40,000) created more jobs than information technology (38,000)

"The IT sector’s contribution to overall annual GDP actually dropped from 2.9% to 2.8%," writes Conway. "Anyone trying to claim that it was largely, or even solely, responsible for the recovery is bananas," he concludes .

As BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones points out, journalists were unable to examine the report's methodology - because they didn't release the reports. We had to make do with a glossy multipage infographic, produced by ... guess what? A glorified PR agency called London & Partners, who happened to be "sponsoring" London Tech Week.

It also sponsored the launch media party last night, on a boat. Our mole noted that at the end of the evening:

"They were giving away cocktails, margaritas and tequila sunrises at the end because they’d not spent the bar tab. I think they were expecting a crush rather than the small crowd who showed up."

Ker-ching! ®