The Mayor’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Strategy Objectives (2022)

The Mayor will deliver this objective through his role in setting the strategic planning framework that developers must follow; and his role administering and overseeing government capital grant funding to a range of investment partners across London.

Setting the planning framework: Policies set out in the London Housing Strategy and the new London Plan include: 

• a target of 50 per cent affordability for all new homes across London 

• tests to ensure these homes are genuinely affordable and remain so in perpetuity 

• a new threshold approach that offers a fast-track route through the planning process for private developments that achieve a minimum of 35 per cent of affordable housing, or 50 per cent on public land.

Funding new development: The Mayor will continue to fund new housing development through his use of the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP), which will see nearly £9bn invested in new affordable homes – including new council homes – by 2026. Through the AHP, the Mayor has contributed to the provision of more than 72,000 affordable homes in London since 2016. He intends to support a further 79,000 affordable housing starts by 2026. 

The impact of these policies and programmes will be primarily measured through the number of affordable housing starts and completions which are published on a quarterly basis. 

Whilst it is not possible to track the characteristics of households occupying individual new affordable units, published analysis has shown that those moving into general needs housing are on average younger Londoners; disproportionately likely to be lone-parent families and female-headed households; and more likely to be headed by people from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic community. 

The Mayor will consider how to track the extent to which new social housing is benefitting those people known to be disproportionately likely to experience overcrowding, homelessness, or poor-quality housing.

The Mayor will deliver this objective through his role in setting the strategic planning framework that developers must follow; and his role administering and overseeing government capital grant funding to a range of investment partners across London.

Setting the planning framework: The London Plan sets requirements for the proportion of new homes that are fully accessible, and the quality and size standards that developments must meet. The Accessible Housing policy of the London Plan sets an expectation that at least 10 per cent of dwellings be ‘wheelchair user dwellings’, and the other 90 per cent be accessible and adaptable.

Funding new developments: Through his bespoke specialist and supported housing programmes and the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP), the Mayor will continue to invest in homes to meet London’s diverse needs, including for older and disabled Londoners. 

In addition, all investment partners funded through the AHP are required to adhere to nine design standards that reflect London Plan requirements, as a contractual condition of funding. These include all new-build dwellings meeting accessibility and adaptability requirements, and 10% of dwellings in all developments with 10 or more homes meeting requirements for wheelchair users. In addition, any development where 10 or more children or young people are expected to live in affordable dwellings must include a minimum amount of play space. 

The impact of these policies and programmes will primarily be measured through the proportion of new-build homes meeting accessibility and adaptability standards, and the number of starts and completions of supported and specialist housing under the AHP. 

The Mayor provides strategic co-ordination and leadership across the city to support people sleeping rough. This includes through joint working with a range of partners, including London’s boroughs.

The GLA also directly commissions pan-London services and runs several programmes to deliver longer-term homes for former rough sleepers.

The multi-agency Life Off the Streets programme, overseen by a board jointly chaired by the GLA and London Councils, is a combination of services and actions to reduce rough sleeping, with an emphasis of making rough sleeping episodes rare, brief, and non-recurrent. Along with outreach programmes and immediate forms of support, this programme also provides longer-term accommodation with wraparound support to those with a history of sleeping rough.

Services targeted at specific groups include the Roma Rough Sleepers Mediator Service, the Youth Accommodation Hub, and the Outside Project, which provides safe emergency accommodation for vulnerable homeless LGBTQ+ people, along with a community centre.

The GLA monitors the performance of its services, with a key aim of at least 85 per cent of those it engages with exiting rough sleeping each year.

The Life Off the Streets executive board/group, working with DLUHC and the Centre of Homelessness Impact, have developed a series of indicators to measure progress towards making rough sleeping rare, brief, and non-recurrent. London is one of five early adopter areas to trial these success measures.

The Mayor is delivering this objective by implementing road user charging schemes; retrofitting London’s polluting buildings; and investing in green infrastructure.

Action on air quality by reducing congestion: Having launched and expanded the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ), the Mayor has now asked Transport for London (TfL) to consult on proposals to make the ULEZ London-wide in August 2023. Any decision will consider the potential impact on disabled Londoners – in particular the extra costs they may face in complying with the scheme.

The Mayor has also asked TfL to explore how future approaches to road user charging could better benefit London. This could include replacing existing road user charging schemes, namely the Congestion Charge and ULEZ. Any future proposals will be subject to a further public and stakeholder consultation with information on detailed scheme proposals.

Retrofitting London’s polluting buildings: The Mayor is the principal delivery partner in London for the UK government’s Sustainable Warmth programme. He has topped up this funding to create the Warmer Homes programme. By distributing £43m of grants, he is providing free heating, insulation, ventilation, and renewable energy improvements for low-income Londoners who own or privately rent energy inefficient homes.

Green infrastructure: The Mayor is tackling inequalities in access to green space through the Grow Back Greener grant programme, which will prioritise projects led by or which tackle barriers to access to green space experienced by Black, Asian or minority ethnic Londoners.

The impacts of actions to improve air quality is measured by calculating the exposure to air pollution between the most and least deprived parts of London, and between communities where Black, Asian and minority ethnic Londoners are most and least likely to live.

The number of Londoners supported through the Warmer Homes programme is tracked, along with the proportion of people who are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic communities, disabled people, or people with long-term health conditions.

The Mayor helps ensure London’s development is informed by a diverse range of expertise and experience through his role in working with boroughs to identify and set the planning frameworks for ‘opportunity areas’ – places with potential for housing, jobs and infrastructure. He is also a funder of regeneration programmes.

Shaping London’s development: Through his ‘Good Growth by Design’ and ‘High Streets for All’ programmes, the Mayor delivers several services to promote quality and inclusion in the built environment. The Mayor’s Design Advocates are a diverse panel of built environment practitioners that support boroughs and high street projects through design reviews, workshops and one-to-one support and guidance. More than half are women and 45% are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. The Architecture and Urbanism Framework is a framework that the Mayor and other public sector commissioning authorities use for architectural, placemaking and urban planning services. It has a core objective of promoting procurement from organisations led by groups that are under-represented in the built environment sector.

Funding regeneration: The High Streets for All Challenge Fund supports communities to take first ideas and develop them through to planned concepts for exemplar high streets. The programme puts underrepresented communities at the forefront of the design and fulfils the aim of ensuring collaboration with local communities on development projects.

Future Mayoral funding, which will include UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF), Levelling Up Fund, and the Mayor’s capital regeneration funding, will continue to be targeted at marginalised and under-represented groups.

Each London borough has a strategy to improve the capacity of organisations and communities to work together to improve their high street, and the performance and achievements of each will be evaluated. The number of community businesses, and cultural and civic organisations supported through the Mayor’s programmes will also be tracked.

The Mayor supports Londoners experiencing and at risk of financial hardship by using his platform to raise awareness of various rights and entitlements. Through his role as a funder of boroughs and voluntary and community sector organisations – particularly those that provide advice to Londoners – he also works to alleviate financial hardship, with a specific focus on those experiencing fuel poverty and food insecurity.

Raising awareness of rights and entitlements: In response to the cost-of-living crisis, the Mayor has launched a dedicated information hub which signposts to different forms of information and support – including information for disabled Londoners, those with no recourse to public funds and older Londoners. This builds on similar approaches relating to employment rights and information for migrant Londoners.

Advice provision: The Mayor’s Advice in Community Settings programme funds partnerships between advice providers and trusted community locations like food and baby banks, and community centres. The Mayor has built on this programme, as part of his cost-of living response, by funding Citizens Advice and the London Legal Support Trust to increase provision within their advice centre networks and offer more outreach and training to community centres.

Tackling fuel poverty: As well as funding the Warmer Homes retrofit programme – which is targeted at low-income households in energy inefficient homes – and the Warmer Homes Advice Service, which provides advice on heating homes and dealing with energy debt, the Mayor is also funding a London-wide energy advice service.

Data for Londoners reached through funded provision, and the outcomes for those Londoners, will be measured and split by demographic characteristics, as will the number of Londoners supported through the Warmer Homes Advice Service. Website traffic data for the cost-of-living, employment rights, and migration hubs will also be tracked.

The Mayor is widening access to mentoring and youth services through his role as a principal funder of children and young people’s programmes along with boroughs and other funders, and by shaping and supporting a broader approach through his convening role. He is also a significant investor in early intervention services to prevent youth violence.

Widening access to mentoring: To help support the London Recovery Programme’s goal of 100,000 young people obtaining mentoring opportunities, the Mayor has invested £5 million to expand high-quality mentoring services focused on those with special educational needs, who have been excluded from school or are at risk of being excluded. He will build on this by working with other funders for the longer-term future of London’s young people as part of the Propel programme – a multi-agency collaborative fund to secure investment in positive opportunities for young people.

In addition to this investment, the Mayor is developing a framework that all commissioners can use to improve the quality of mentoring and youth provision.

Preventing youth violence: By working in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime, and the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), the Mayor will address the complex causes of violence, often driven by low income and inequality, while at the same time calling for greater national investment. The VRU will deliver violence reduction programmes in the areas of education and schools; early intervention; youth work; young people; and communities.

The Mayor collects data on the demographics of the young people who benefit from GLA projects delivered as part of the New Deal for Young People mission.

London’s Violence Reduction Unit continues to track the results of its programmes and is currently revising how it may develop or change these for future monitoring. This will be reported into the GLA.

The Mayor will deliver this objective through his use of the Adult Education Budget and other skills investment; and through the opportunities created within the GLA’s supply chain.

Commissioner of skills and employment support training: The Mayor invests £380 million a year in skills and employment support through programmes targeted at groups that face persistent labour market inequalities, including the £320 million Adult Education Budget.

This includes the £44 million Skills Academy Programme which will help Londoners hardest hit by the pandemic to gain good jobs, whilst supporting employers to strengthen workforce diversity; the £41 million Multiply programme which prioritises parents and carers, care leavers and those with experience of the criminal justice system to improve their maths and numeracy skills; and the No Wrong Door programme, which will help Londoners access the right support at the right time to help them into good work and includes a focus on disabled Londoners, women returning to work, Londoners over the age of 50, and refugees.

In addition to the above, as the designated lead for managing London’s £144 million share of the new three-year UK Shared Prosperity Fund, the Mayor will work with partners to agree how to use the funding. It is likely that some of the money will go towards adult education, careers support and targeted interventions.

Opportunities in the supply chain: The Mayor’s Responsible Procurement policy insists on making training and employment opportunities, with diversity targets, part of contracts for supply chain organisations. This results in 500 new supply chain apprenticeships yearly.

The Mayor’s skills and employment support programmes collect learner outcomes data broken down by a range of demographic characteristics, including ethnicity, gender, disability, and age.

The Responsible Procurement Implementation Plan will continue to require suppliers to measure and report quarterly on the demographics of apprenticeship and job starts.

The Mayor harnesses the collective £9bn annual spending power of the GLA Group to ensure suppliers and delivery partners are contributing to inclusive workplaces. He also provides support and resources to employers to improve their inclusion practices.

Influence over supply chain and key sectors: The Mayor will use the GLA Group Responsible Procurement Policy to promote the Mayor’s Good Work Standard (GWS) as the means for setting benchmarks for fair pay and recruitment diversity amongst the GLA’s suppliers. He will also encourage use of the Workforce Integration Network.

The Skills Roadmap for London sets an expectation for adult education providers funded by the Mayor to be representative of the communities they serve, and to meet or work towards the GWS. A toolkit is being developed of best practice in building a representative workforce, and a support programme for skills providers.

Support for employers: The Mayor’s Good Work Standard and the Making London a Living Wage City Programme are both means for encouraging good work opportunities for Londoners most at risk of low pay and insecure employment.

The Good Work Standard sets the benchmark for best employment practice and has recently been expanded to incorporate a new focus on London’s 600,000 microbusinesses. A further Charter for Good Work in the Gig Economy has also been developed.

The Mayor co-chairs the Making London a Living Wage City programme which draws together employers, workers, and community groups, to promote the London Living Wage. Its initial focus is employment within sectors characterised by low-pay and insecure work.

Through the implementation of the Responsible Procurement Policy, the number of Good Work Standard accredited suppliers will be tracked, as will the proportion of key suppliers to have disclosed their workforce diversity data through the Diversity Data Benchmarking initiative.  The average reported gender pay gap among main suppliers will also be reported, while the potential to develop a performance measure for main suppliers to track ethnicity pay gaps is being explored.

The Mayor is driving up supplier diversity through the implementation of the GLA Responsible Procurement Policy. He is also working with partners – including London’s anchor institutions – to co-ordinate business support for minoritised groups who often face barriers to starting and running a business.

Influence over the supply chain: The Responsible Procurement Policy Implementation Plan sets out a range of initiatives through which the GLA Group will remove barriers to small and diverse businesses entering its supply chain. These include the Mayor’s Architecture + Urbanism framework, which aims to ensure all aspects of the framework under his control are inclusive, and an inclusive commissioning protocol developed by the GLA Skills and Employment unit to ensure the Adult Education Budget is used to encourage supplier diversity.

In addition, the Mayor has helped establish the London Anchor Institutions Charter, through which organisations are using procurement with suppliers to help tackle social, economic and health inequalities.

Providing business support: The Mayor is reviewing London’s business support to improve service take-up among people from underrepresented communities.

The £100m Greater London Investment Fund (GLIF) launched by the Mayor to support his Economic Development Strategy has a goal of investing £20m in businesses headed by people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, women, and disabled people.

The Responsible Procurement Implementation Plan will track the number and proportion of SME suppliers in the GLA Group supply chain, and develop a new measure of supplier diversity.

There are also quarterly reports on the direct investment by GLIF in minority-owned businesses.

Through his role as one of the main commissioners of skills and training in London, and working with boroughs and the voluntary and community sector through the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI), the Mayor will support design, testing and roll-out of programmes that will make it easier for digitally-excluded Londoners to get online and increase their skills. 

Commissioner of skills and training: Through the Adult Education Budget, the Mayor funds a free entitlement to basic digital skills training. It targets groups disproportionately likely to be digitally excluded – particularly migrants, older Londoners, and women. The Skills for Londoners community grants outreach programme helps with entitlement take-up.  

Working through LOTI: The Mayor, in partnership with the LOTI, and the Good Things Foundation, has launched a new Digital Inclusion Service that will support up to 75,000 people over three years. It is the first city-wide service of its kind in the UK. It will partner with the Good Things Foundation and provide support to digitally excluded people by setting up:  

• a device bank for London 
• a data bank, offering free or low-cost mobile connectivity 
• a network of organisations offering skills courses, help and training 

As with the rest of the Adult Education Budget, the Mayor will publish learner outcome results for basic digital skills training, with data broken down by a range of demographic characteristics, including ethnicity, gender, disability and age.

The design phase of the Digital Inclusion Service will identify methods of tracking progress and results.  

The Mayor has a statutory duty to develop and publish a Health Inequalities Strategy (HIS) for London. He uses his role as a convenor of many London organisations to push forward the priorities in the strategy. He will fund initiatives directly and in partnership with other agencies and bodies, using his profile to raise awareness and stimulate action on health topics.

Through the London Recovery Board’s Healthy Place, Healthy Weight mission, the Mayor is working with and providing funding to London’s boroughs to set up School Superzones in the 30 per cent most socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods.

Through the London Recovery Board’s Mental Health and Wellbeing mission, the Mayor is working with Thrive LDN to increase awareness and understanding of mental ill-health across London and combat its stigma. A £100,000 Right to Thrive Innovation Fund will support community mental health projects for Londoners experiencing discrimination.

And in acknowledgement of the role that ethnicity in driving health inequalities, the Mayor will work with health partners to launch a structural racism learning and practice hub.

The Mayor will publish quarterly updates on the main commitments in the HIS plan, and an annual report showing progress against its broader aims. There are also 14 population health inequalities indicators published on London datastore and updated regularly.

As well as working to bring the GLA and London’s communities closer to each other, the Mayor has a wider convening role to encourage a broad cultural offering that is reflective of, and accessible to, London’s diverse communities, ensuring the capital’s history is celebrated and commemorated appropriately.

A public realm that reflects our city: The Mayor’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm is reviewing and assessing London’s public tributes, including statues and other landmarks. By 2023 there will be more objects in the public realm that tell a wider, diverse, and more representative story of London. The commission’s work includes the £1 million Untold Stories fund for organisations representing diverse communities to help shape London’s outdoor public spaces by creating, testing, and developing projects that help tell the stories of London’s diverse communities. The Commission also convenes and supports boroughs to adopt its approach and ambitions. And emblematic projects lead by the Mayor will shape proposals for specific memorials or monuments, engaging communities in their development.

The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture award shines a light on the diversity and different characters of the city’s neighbourhoods. Boroughs can bid for more than £1 million in funding to create a programme of cultural activities celebrating the unique character of local people and places,

Engaging Londoners: Communities and individuals will be encouraged to influence, shape, and take part in the city’s recovery from the pandemic through the London Engagement Collaborative.

The Mayor will track which organisations have applied for Untold Stories grants, using this knowledge to encourage other communities and parts of London to apply. He will assess the numbers and diversity of borough residents taking part in the London Borough of Culture programme, including both in-person and digital participation.

The Mayor provides grants to community and civil society organisations. He also convenes partner bodies that support and fund pan-London and local civic and voluntary bodies.

Grant making: The Mayor will continue to support the grassroots and frontline charities that form the backbone of London’s civil society – and the infrastructure organisations that support them – through the Civil Society Roots programme. The Civil Society Roots fund focuses on 10 ‘cold spots’ where funders struggle to reach community groups. The £1m of funding will support communities of people with protected characteristics affected by structural and disproportionate inequalities.

The Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme protects grassroots cultural centres, social clubs, education, and youth centres, particularly those led by, and serving, underrepresented groups.

The Building Strong Communities Fund and Sport Unites will provide financial support to communities hit hard by Covid-19. The former will provide nearly £1 million through micro and small grants, supporting local voluntary and community organisations as they involve Londoners in shaping their recovery. The emphasis is on raising often unheard voices, and increasing feelings of connection and belonging, and tackling loneliness.  Sport Unites aims to increase people’s physical activity and improve people’s mental health and wellbeing. It also has objectives of strengthening connections and reducing loneliness.

Convening: The Mayor will continue working in partnership with funders, support organisations and grassroots bodies to invest in tools, such as the Civic Strength Index, and approaches that will help foster a better understanding of how and where targeted interventions from partners may best improve the strength and resilience of London’s civil society.

The Mayor tracks the number of people engaging in volunteering and community participation activity through the Building Strong Communities mission, and the proportion of those people who are from underrepresented groups. He also aims to monitor the extent to which Londoners from underrepresented groups who participate in his programmes say they feel they belong to their neighbourhood.