An Economic Framework for London

Last updated: December 2022

The original framework was published in November 2021, to support the strategic coordination around the urgent recovery needs from the pandemic. 

As the city reopens and the capital transitions from recovery to fostering longer-term good growth, we must deal with the structural challenges within London’s economy.

To identify gaps in our activity, to come together with partners around new areas of work and to meaningfully tackle challenges of this scale we now need a clear framework for action.

For this reason, teams at the GLA, London Councils and boroughs have worked together to refresh the Economic Framework.

By consolidating and agreeing this activity in a framework approach we can build on the work of the missions, by both demonstrating how they fit with a wider range of activities and by bringing further partners to bear to address shared challenges.

This will ensure that London government achieves more than the sum of its parts. This includes the need to target our activities towards addressing structural inequalities that have resulted in disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on some groups of Londoners, and mobilising at the scale and pace required to meaningfully tackle the climate and ecological crises.

The refreshed framework continues to contain five pillars of activity – Jobs, Business, Thriving Neighbourhoods, Connected City and Global London. Within each pillar are four key issues to focus collective efforts on, with building the green economy and narrowing social, economic and health inequalities as cross-cutting themes.

A central purpose of this framework is the articulation of roles and responsibilities for the constituent parts of London’s government. There are activities which are best delivered by the GLA Group, those that boroughs are best placed to act on, and those which are best coordinated across sub-regions or by Sub Regional Partnerships. This framework makes a clear distinction between roles across these parties, as well as areas where all need to work in a coordinated fashion.

In order to achieve a ‘full system response’ to the challenges that the pandemic poses to London’s economy, it is also important that we are able to jointly call on partners across central government, major institutions and business to play their parts. This framework identifies key opportunities for central government to support recovery activities and levelling up.

It also sets out areas in which major institutions can contribute, as distinct from and in addition to the Anchor Institutions Charter, which is already working with key institutions to deliver on priority activities for Londoners, and on which an update is also being presented at this meeting. Finally, it sets out how the business community have levers to effect positive change.

An Economic Framework for London.

Launch of the Economic Recovery Implementation Plan

The Economic Recovery Implementation Plan has been published, setting out how the GLA Group and Family are driving action to help London’s economy grow back stronger, greener and fairer and how we will deliver the Economic Recovery Framework.