The young Londoners turning to sugar daddies to pay their rent

0:06Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to the Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For the latest news, head to the London Standard at standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, we'll be diving into the world of London's sugar daddies and babies. Comparing it to Hinge, on the surface of it, it looks relatively similar, I guess. if you didn't know the history of it and if you didn't know that people were using it for paid arrangements. But then as soon as the men start messaging you, you kind of realise that that is what it's for. They would say, hey, I've been in an arrangement before, I can pay you £800 every time we meet, or I can give you£5 ,000 a month.

0:56That's when it starts getting more overtly mercenary.

1:04But first, a row over events such as Mighty Hoopla is playing out in the High Court. The campaign group Protect Brockwell Park alleges that the council acted improperly by granting a licence for events without planning permission. Joining me now is the London Standards reporter, Megan Howe. Megan, you're at the High Court today for the Brockwell Park hearing. What is this case actually about? Campaigners under the name Protected Brockwell Park have essentially launched a legal challenge against Lambeth Council's decision to allow a commercial event called Brockwell Live to take place under permitted development rules in a move which they argue bypasses proper planning scrutiny.

1:49Essentially this is a legal mechanism that allows up to 28 days of temporary use of parkland each year without requiring planning permission. So campaigners argue that the council has acted improperly, essentially by granting a licence without planning permission. Campaigners believe events like Brockwell Live, which attracts more than 285 ,000 attendees over the space of nine days, have an adverse ecological impact on the park, including damage to grasslands, harm to trees, and disruption to route protection zones caused by heavy equipment. Events include Wide Awake, Field Day, Cross the Tracks and Mighty Hoopla as well.

2:32These large, major events. Protect Brockwell Park are essentially calling for the park to remain fully open and protected for public use over the summer. The campaign has actually been backed by Oscar-winning actor Sir Mark Rylance, who is a local resident and has claimed that these events turn the space into a prison camp, referencing the large green fencing which goes around the park during the festival. So on April 9th, Protect Brockwell Park sent a pre-action letter to the council, essentially notifying them of their intent to initiate court proceedings. They also launched a crowd justice page to cover the legal costs, which has now raised just under£40 ,000.

3:13pounds. The High Court battle has taken place today. And what are opponents saying? So Lambeth Council has said that the events in Brockwell Park run for only a short period of time over the summer. They also generate a significant amount of income, obviously, for the council and also cultural opportunities for the borough and also entertainment for young people. They have also said the area used for events has been independently assessed as being of low ecological sensitivity grassland and that essentially no ecological damage has been caused as a result. Income from the events the council says has also helped put money into diversity projects in other areas of the park with at least£20 ,000 invested in this way last year.

3:59An open letter was also published addressing residents of Lambeth, insisting that spaces such as music venues, clubs and also late night cafes are vital for local communities. So they've essentially said that these types of events provide work. They obviously foster creativity and they also offer safe spaces for people from all walks of life. Without them, Lambeth risks becoming sterile, unaffordable and soulless. So when will we know more? The hearing is taking place at the High Court today and is held before Mr Justice Mould. He is expected to make a decision by two o 'clock tomorrow afternoon.

4:41And more broadly, what could this mean for the future of music festivals in the capital? So if the court rules in favour of the Protect Brockwell Park Group, it could pave the way for the Greater London Authority to intervene in the application, or it could also potentially lead to the whole event needing retrospective approval, which is obviously a scenario that Lambeth Council so far has managed to avoid.

5:15let's go to a break coming up in part two would you date a rich older man in exchange for cash we'll see you back here in just a moment

5:42Welcome back. Now, if you listened to yesterday's episode, we covered the lack of affordable housing in London. And for some young professionals, turning to sugar daddies to help pay the bills seems like an easy option worth pursuing. There are websites full of wealthy men seeking intimacy, travel companions and no strings attached relationships in exchange for a lot of money. Joining us now is the London Standard's Claudia Cockerell, who has been covering this story. So Claudia, what is the premise behind sites such as Seeking and What's Your Price? Seeking and What's Your Price are two websites which were founded by an American entrepreneur called Brandon Wade.

6:29He founded Seeking in 2006 and the premise has changed a little bit since then. But when he first founded it, it was because he'd graduated from MIT. he was on a six-figure salary and he wasn't having any luck with women so he set up seeking arrangement as it was then called as a way for rich older men to meet younger attractive women you know the men would give them money take them on holidays give them this kind of luxurious lifestyle and wade kind of explained that that was to give men like him a fighting chance and he was pretty open about the fact that you know it was a it was a sugar daddy sugar baby website he once said that he thought love was a concept invented by poor people.

7:10He was transparent about the transactional element of it then. He also then set up another website called What's Your Price in 2011, which it's much more kind of on the nose. It's where men essentially bid to go on dates with women. They'll submit an offer and the woman can kind of counter it, accept it or decline it. And once they've agreed on a price, the man will give the woman cash on the date. That one is kind of escorting with different PR. Wade then changed Seeking Arrangement. The website had a whole kind of makeover in 2022 because it had been caught up in quite a lot of kind of scandals.

7:47There was actually a entrepreneur who appeared on Dragon's Den a few years before. He went to court because he had sex with a girl he'd met through Seeking Arrangement who had said she was 17 and turned out to be 13. he actually got cleared of the charges because he claimed not to have known. And then over in America, there was lots of sex trafficking cases. The most prominent one was Matt Gaetz, who was the former US representative for Florida and a Trump ally. And in 2020, he was accused of having sex with women who he'd met through the website and paying them money. So in 2022, they had this big makeover.

8:25Seeking arrangement became seeking. all the references to kind of financial compensation on the website were dropped. It actually now says in their community guidelines that you can't pay people to go on dates with you. You shouldn't be giving them any sort of allowance or exchange of money for sex. And they call it now a dating website. They say it's aimed at people looking for hypergamy, which basically means kind of marrying above your station, whether that's through it with someone attractive or with someone rich. It's all very wholesome now. they describe themselves as family run. Brandon Wade is now married to a woman through the website 30 years younger than him.

9:00She's 24, he's 54. People are still using it as a sugar dating website. All of the women that I spoke to said that while it may look different, that's what it's still being used for. And why are young women turning to these websites? I think that people turn to these websites not necessarily out of desire but out of necessity it's quite a good kind of recession indicator the women I spoke to a lot of them had university degrees they were kind of well educated and they did have this safety net to to fall back on in a kind of cost of living crisis when it's really difficult to find a job people's minds always do go to these alternative income streams like I remember when I was kind of unemployed having just left university and living with my parents, I kept googling flu camp, where you go for two weeks and they give you a virus and you get paid about a thousand pounds.

9:51Seeking is just another one of those alternative ways of making money. None of the kind of terminology of sex work is used around it, so people see it as a slightly more glamorous option. One of the girls I actually spoke to said that she kind of felt like she had the power because she was going on these dates with what she described as very tragic losers. She thought she held the keys until it all backfired on her. and you and undercover to find out more tell me what you discovered i signed up to seeking and what struck me was how easy it was to create a profile so i signed up as both a successful member which is traditionally what the older men use and an attractive member which is the younger women and both profiles took about five minutes to create all you need to do is a selfie verification I don't think it really means anything.

10:40Maybe they cross-reference it when you try and upload pictures. When I was signing up as a man, you can choose your net worth from between 40 ,000 and over 80 million. And there's no sort of verification process in place to check that these men aren't lying about their net worth. But then when I was kind of through onto the websites, what I noticed, I guess, was that you can kind of choose tags to add to your profile. Lots of the men had no strings attached, intimacy, romance, someone who is passport ready, looking for a travel companion, whereas the women were more looking for platonic relationships and mentorship, emotional support.

11:18So there's this dissonance where the men are quite clearly looking for people to have sex with and the women want money or they want financial support. That I think is where the key tension lies. I don't see why an attractive young woman would sign up to that website unless she was looking for money. This all sounds kind of morally dubious. What are the safety risks? To me, it doesn't look like anything really has been done to ensure that scammers can't get on the website. From the woman I spoke to, that became clear. One of the people I interviewed, this girl called Katie, she signed up to What's Your Price because she wanted basically to make quick easy cash from going on first dates with men she had just moved into a flat in south london with friends and couldn't really afford her rent because she's a kind of playwright with with no fixed income her and her friend realized that they could semi-scam the men themselves you know go on these first dates with guys they would usually give her something in the region of 200 pounds she wouldn't have to do anything with them and then she would leave the dinner and kind of never see them again say that she hadn't felt the chemistry and if they persisted or anything she would just block them.

12:27So she was going on one or two of these dates a week. And then she actually met a guy who she really liked. He was kind of attractive, well-spoken, well-dressed. They saw each other again and entered into this relationship where he would give her a few hundred pounds every so often, take her to fancy hotels. They would do weekends away together. He had said that he was American and he'd said that he was a businessman who came to London every month or so to have kind of meetings with high-powered clients and things. They saw each other once or twice a month for about a year. And then after a year, she kind of broke things off.

13:04She told me that she got the ick. And then she got this email from someone claiming to be a friend of his, long story short, saying that he had fallen into a coma and that, you know, the family had lots of questions for her. And she replied saying, you know, how sorry she was. was obviously slightly skeptical and then a month later she got another email saying that her sugar daddy had died and her family knew he'd been sending her money and wanted it back so at this point she's really freaking out because she didn't have the money he'd actually given her I think it was five thousand pounds for a play she was putting on and the play had happened and that was the money they wanted back so she starts kind of frantically trying to find out again who he is She'd always Googled him with the name he'd given her and nothing had ever come up.

13:52And then a friend of hers actually managed to trace his phone number to like a kind of small list of numbers and find out who it was linked to. And it turned out that he wasn't actually this high powered businessman, but the pastor of a church in the American South. He wasn't a bachelor, but he had a wife and two kids. There was all these videos and pictures of him preaching on the church's Instagram. He was very much alive. She still thought that it was quite a decent way to make money if you're a young person in London. And again, I think that kind of speaks to the dire state of the economy.

14:30Another woman I spoke to who's an economic anthropologist said that sex work is often something people will turn to in times of economic downturn. The other side of that is that a lot of the men on these websites are not rich at all. There's only so many millionaires in London. they will lie about their income. So there's a kind of double scam that goes on. Sometimes the women will go on these websites just to make quick cash but then a lot of the men on there also are scammers or catfishers. I don't think that many women do have a positive experience through websites like this. You may think that you can go for these dinners or whatever and make lots of money but I think that what the women and the men on the websites are after is different.

15:11That clash is never really going to end well. And it can be dangerous. A lot of women have lost money through the sites from men pretending they want to send them loads of money and saying, look, give me your bank details. There was this one woman who lost thousands of pounds. So there is a lot of risk, both financially and also emotionally, I guess.

15:32And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk and please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. This podcast returns tomorrow at 4pm. We'll see you then.