London

At the Greater London Authority, digital work is led by Theo Blackwell, London’s first Chief Digital Officer, in post since 2017. His team runs the London Datastore, the GLA’s open-data portal since 2010, which lists 1,306 datasets. In July 2025 it launched the Data for London catalogue, which links to other bodies’ data and is due to replace the Datastore. It holds 22,516 records, but 16,903 of them, about 75%, come from a single borough, Croydon.

Organisation in focus

Greater London Authority - Smart London

Leads digital transformation, using data and connectivity to improve urban services citywide.

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From our library

Mayor of London launches a next-generation city data platform to unlock the power of data for Londoners (GLA, 8 July 2025)

The launch of Data for London, the catalogue due to replace the Datastore.

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The boroughs pool part of their innovation work in LOTI, the London Office of Technology and Innovation, hosted by London Councils, the boroughs’ cross-party association. Set up in 2019, it had 27 member boroughs by January 2024, each paying £30,000 a year. An evaluation that LOTI commissioned from the GLA, which also funds it, found that it saves members time and money, including at least £300,000 on recruitment support. Collaboration across councils remains hard, the same report found.

TfL, with 27,000 staff, publishes free real-time transport data through one interface, its Unified API. It says more than 17,000 developers have registered for the feeds and that 42% of Londoners use apps built on them, figures it does not date. Under the streets, Boldyn Networks holds a 20-year concession from 2021 to bring mobile coverage into the Tube’s tunnels.

Breathe London, the GLA’s network of low-cost air-quality sensors, was run by Imperial College London under a 2020 contract. A consortium led by Vodafone, with the charity Global Action Plan and the sensor maker Airly, runs it now. The GLA has committed up to £1.4m to the network for 2024 to 2028.

Lighthouse project

Breathe London

Hundreds of sensors map street‑level pollution, influencing London's emission zones and school safety.

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Research sits close to City Hall. The Alan Turing Institute, the national institute for data science and AI, co-ran London Data Week in 2025. Stuart Coleman, a director at the Open Data Institute, sits on the Data for London advisory board.

London tech companies raised $17.7bn in 2025, according to Dealroom, a data firm, and the city counts 138 unicorns, start-ups valued at a billion dollars or more. That put London back ahead of Paris on Dealroom’s index of European hubs. Its figures do not say how much of the money went into urban technology.

Campaigners shape the arguments about what the city deploys. Big Brother Watch, a civil-liberties group, brought the latest court challenge to police facial recognition in London. Transport for All, an organisation of disabled people, says unregulated dockless bikes and e-scooters put disabled pedestrians in danger. The Good Things Foundation, a national digital-inclusion charity, delivers Get Online London for City Hall.

Sir Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party won a third term as Mayor in May 2024; the next mayoral election is on 4 May 2028. His 2018 roadmap, Smarter London Together, set out to make London “the smartest city in the world”. No successor smart-city strategy could be found. The work now runs through Data for London and the London Growth Plan, launched by the Mayor and London Councils in February 2025, which aims to restore productivity growth to 2% a year.

A taskforce on AI and jobs, chaired by Baroness Martha Lane-Fox, a tech entrepreneur and member of the House of Lords, made three recommendations in 2026, from an early-warning system for jobs at risk to routes into work for young Londoners. In September the London Partnership Board was asked only to endorse exploring them further.

Since April 2026 part of the national government’s money has reached City Hall as one integrated settlement, the GLA’s first. It brings just over £500m a year, over £1.7bn across three years. It covers growth, skills, housing, health and the environment, and the GLA may not spend it on what TfL or the police do.

City Hall sets strategy, the London Plan and the climate target. TfL runs public transport and the clean-air zone, and publishes the transport data. The boroughs run most streets and pavements, council tax, housing and their own IT. A new law, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, makes TfL the licensing authority for dockless hire bikes, but only once ministers make the regulations.

The boroughs changed hands in May 2026. Labour’s share of the London-wide vote fell to 25.6%, from 40.3% in 2022. The Greens now lead six boroughs and hold majorities in Hackney, Lewisham and Waltham Forest, the first councils London voters have put them in charge of. Reform UK won Havering, its only London council. The 32 boroughs are now led by six parties, which LOTI and Data for London must work with.

Policing money runs through MOPAC, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which oversees the Metropolitan Police (the Met). In late May 2026 MOPAC refused a contract for Palantir, a data-analytics firm, to supply the Met with analytics for investigations and anti-corruption work. It was worth £25.3m for 2026-27, with an optional second year of £24.8m, and MOPAC cited procurement and value for money.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, had counted on the software to help cut about 500 jobs and close a £125m gap. Without it, he said, the cuts would “directly hit the delivery of policing to London’s communities”. Palantir took MOPAC to the High Court. On 14 October 2026 the two sides settled: each withdrew its allegations against the other, MOPAC said its decision was not based on Palantir’s values or ethics, and the work will be re-tendered with Palantir free to bid.

From our library

Statement: MOPAC and Palantir (Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, 14 October 2026)

The 14 October 2026 settlement of Palantir’s High Court case against MOPAC.

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The other argument is over cameras. Since October 2025 the Met has run fixed live facial-recognition cameras on Croydon High Street. It reported 173 arrests from 24 operations to March 2026, with one false alert. In the IMD survey, 68.4% of London’s respondents said they were comfortable with face recognition being used to lower crime.

In April 2026 the High Court upheld the Met’s policy on the narrow question the claimants put, whether its use was foreseeable; it did not rule on whether it was necessary. Thompson has said he will appeal. The national rules are set out in the United Kingdom profile.

From our library

The Legality of Police Live Facial Recognition Policy: The Scope and Limitations of Thompson and Carlo (Inforrm, 19 May 2026)

Explores April 2026 High Court ruling on foreseeability, shaping London’s live facial‑recognition expansion.

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The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), run by TfL, has covered all of Greater London since 29 August 2023. Drivers of older, more polluting vehicles pay £12.50 for each day they drive in it. By September 2024, 96.7% of vehicles subject to the standard met it, against 39% in February 2017. TfL’s modelled estimate puts roadside nitrogen dioxide 27% lower across London than in a scenario without the zone. All the zone’s phases together cut carbon dioxide by an estimated 2%. TfL’s one-year report of March 2025 is the latest published evaluation.

From our library

London-wide Ultra Low Emission Zone – One Year Report (TfL, March 2025)

TfL’s own evaluation of the London-wide clean-air zone; its air-quality gains are modelled.

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The National Underground Asset Register began as a London map of buried pipes and cables. The GLA ran a £1m pilot across six boroughs from May 2019 and a £1.4m second phase across 12, both paid for by the Geospatial Commission, part of the Cabinet Office. A third phase was to cover all 33 authorities by March 2023, with 60 asset owners taking part. The GLA’s decision paper expects the national register to bring £347m a year in benefits once it is running. London then became one of the three regions in the register’s first national version.

Get Online London, run by the GLA with LOTI and the Good Things Foundation, hands out devices, data and skills through community hubs. By March 2025 it had supported about 125,000 Londoners, refurbished more than 7,000 devices and given out almost 90,000 data packages. Its hubs grew to more than 1,100, from 90 in July 2022, on about £2.56m of GLA digital-inclusion money from 2021 to 2025. The extension to December 2026 aims to reach 108,000 more people and promises a full evaluation.

Mobile coverage on the Underground is being built by Boldyn Networks under its TfL concession. The whole Elizabeth line has had coverage since December 2024. By 14 January 2026, the latest count TfL has published that we could open, 62 of the Tube’s 121 underground stations were connected. TfL’s target is the whole network by the end of 2026.

Dockless e-bikes have no single regulator in London yet. Four operators, Bolt, Forest, Lime and Voi, run a reported 50,000 bikes, which TfL estimates made more than one in ten cycle journey stages in 2024. Each borough strikes its own deal, so the rules change at borough borders. The London Assembly’s transport committee met on the subject on 8 October 2026, while TfL waits for its licensing regulations.

Transport for London was hacked in August and September 2024. The intrusion left 148 systems inoperable, forced all staff to reset passwords in person, and disrupted Dial-a-Ride, the door-to-door service for vulnerable Londoners, along with refunds and children’s Oyster photocards. The National Crime Agency puts TfL’s loss and recovery costs at a reported £29m. Two leading members of Scattered Spider, an online criminal group, were each sentenced to five and a half years in July 2026.

From our library

Two sentenced for hacking Transport for London in UK's biggest ever cyber crime case (National Crime Agency, 16 July 2026)

How the 2024 attack on TfL was carried out, what it cost and who was sentenced.

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Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham share their IT, and an attack found on 24 November 2025 copied data from it. At the councils’ latest update, on 3 July 2026, the council-tax and business-rates system was still not fully running. In Hackney, a 2020 ransomware attack encrypted 440,000 files; the Information Commissioner’s Office, the data-protection regulator, reprimanded the council in 2024.

Sorted by who holds the lever, the record has a pattern. What TfL runs carries numbers: a zone almost every vehicle now complies with, and Tube stations connected one by one. What City Hall starts with Whitehall’s money can travel, as the buried-pipes map did, or nearly stop when City Hall’s budget runs short, as Get Online London almost did before a minister’s grant kept it going to December 2026. What the boroughs hold depends on agreement: 27 councils share LOTI, e-bike deals stop at each border, and three councils that shared their IT went down together. The police purse let City Hall stop one contract; which software the Met gets now rests on a tender Palantir may enter. The services residents use every week sit with 33 councils City Hall does not run.