The Greater London Authority is a strategic regional authority, with powers over transport, policing, economic development and fire and emergency planning. The GLA Group spends around £9.5 billion on goods and services annually. The GLA group is made up of functional bodies which includes Transport for London, London Fire Brigade, London Legacy Development Corporation, the Metropolitan Police Service, Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime, and Old Oak and Park, Royal Development Corporation
8.5m Population | |
| 12bn Annual spend |
| 78k Employees |
Tim Rudin
Head of GLA Group Responsible Procurement Team
More information? Email procurement@iclei.org
For the GLA Group, responsible procurement means pioneering socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable procurement to deliver improved quality of life and better value for money. It involves working in partnership across London to provide sustained employment opportunities and improve working conditions. It means opening access to contract opportunities for London’s diverse businesses, and voluntary and community sector organisations, encouraging improved practices with our suppliers and promoting greater environmental sustainability to make London a better place to live and work.
Through the GLA Group’s extensive public procurement of products and services, the GLA Group Responsible Procurement Policy is designed to deliver lasting positive change. This will be achieved by:
In order to implement and prioritise the key themes of the policy, the GLA Group Central Responsible Procurement Team has published a Responsible Procurement Implementation Plan. The plan sets out the ambitions and key actions that the GLA Group Functional Bodies will prioritise to deliver the Responsible Procurement Policy. These are shared by and implemented across the Functional Bodies and cover a number of key policy areas.
The plan also outlines a number of metrics to track the delivery of social value through the implementation of the Responsible Procurement Policy. Metrics are reviewed on a quarterly and annual basis with Functional Bodies meeting at the quarterly forum to share best practice and challenges to support collaborative delivery of the Policy.
Transport for London (TfL) is the integrated transport authority responsible for delivering Mayor of London Sadiq Khan's strategy and commitments on transport. We run the day-to-day operation of the Capital's public transport network and manage London's main roads. Every day more than 31 million journeys are made across our network. We do all we can to keep the city moving, working and growing and to make life in our city better.
To ensure value for money and enable Londoners to benefit from TfL spend, key suppliers are required to make employment, skills, and training opportunities more accessible to the communities they serve. Since 2009, Transport for London (TfL) has worked in partnership with suppliers to provide opportunities to people from a range of backgrounds, while also ensuring the deliverability of its future business plan. This has been supported with career programmes and in 2023the annual supply chain apprenticeship fair recommenced in person following the Covid-19 pandemic when the event continued online. There were over 1000 attendees, 25 employers and 10 employability partners who were all available for a whole day. Since 2009, TfL has helped to create over 8000 supply chain apprenticeship starts and over 6500 workless job starts, while 168 ex-offenders have been supported into employment.
TfL in collaboration with other transport sector client organisations has engaged in an initiative to improve diversity in the supply chain through cofounding the Sustainability School’s Fairness, Inclusion, and Respect (FIR) programme. The programme is designed to offer training, access to resources and a network of FIR ambassadors at no cost to the supply chain to help improve equality, diversity, and inclusion in the sector. In 2022, TfL suppliers accessed 582 online resources and 138 individuals attended training delivered through the FIR programme. In September 2022, suppliers attended an inclusive recruitment session with live actors that brought to life examples of biases and barriers in the recruitment process faced by those with protected characteristics.
Since 2019, TfL has adopted the use of recycled plastic railway sleepers across above-ground sections of the London Underground since 2019 which are made from 99% recycled materials which lead to a 200 tonnes of carbon emission saved per every 200 kilometres. The sleepers didn’t just reduce carbon emission but were also known to have increased durability, minimum maintenance requirements and significant performance enhancements.
With more than 47,000 officers and staff, MPS is the UK’s largest Police Service accounting for 25% of the total police budget for England and Wales. MPS direct procurement spend exceeds £1bn annually, with about 1.3bn spent in 2022/2023 financial year.
As a significant purchaser of goods and services, the MPS has the potential to generate considerable social and environmental impacts both directly and indirectly through our procurement activities and the supply chain. The MPS continues to minimise the impacts of its procurement decisions through the adoption of social, environmental, and economically responsible procurement processes which can also deliver greater value for money.
The MPS through the “Get Online London” program donated 5600 refurbished smartphones and 7500 laptops which were distributed alongside other donations to community organisations, libraries, and charities across London 32 boroughs to benefit London citizens who did not previously own or have access to digital technology. The MPS worked in collaboration with the Good Things Foundation, Reconome and our IT Partner (Capgemini). This led to an estimate reduction of 868kg waste reduction, contributes towards MPS commitment to reduce its environmental impact and promote a more circular economy.
London Fire Brigade is the UK capital’s fire and rescue service - one of the largest firefighting and rescue organisations in the world. The Brigade spends up to £271m in the recent year on a wide range of goods, services and works and aims to deliver improvements right across the sustainability agenda. Work in this area includes continuing to pay some 180 contractors’ staff the London Living Wage; and delivering 109 job starts and 22 apprenticeships over the past 5 years.
LFB in collaboration with Babcock Critical Services and Emergency One has pioneered the development of a novel electric fire engine called ZEPA 1 (Zero Emission Pumping Appliance), which utilises similar control systems to conventional fire engines. The appliance has a range of more than 200 miles. It can pump water continuously at 3,000 litres per minute on battery alone for just under three hours (and over the legislated four hours on its back-up power source).
This is a further improvement to LFB’s decarbonisation of their vehicles in 2016. This programme replaced 100% of fleet cars with electric vehicles and a total of sixty-six diesel ‘blue lighted’ pool cars were replaced with fifty-two range extender electric BMW i3 vehicles, and 5 plug-in hybrid cars.
The new fire engine is due to be used out of Hammersmith fire station during 2023,fulfilling part of the LFB sustainable development strategy 2023 to 2025 and helping to deliver LFB’s commitment to significantly reduce carbon emissions and achieve air quality improvements to meet London’s net zero 2030 targets.
Given the specialist nature of our vehicles, the supplier needed to devise a range of innovative solutions to meet the required needs. Solutions were identified through close working to ensure there was a clear understanding of the requirements and that the solutions would meet rigorous testing.
The Mayor of London oversees two Development Corporations that are part of the GLA Group family. The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC)’s purpose is to use the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of the London 2012 Games and the creation of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to develop a dynamic new heart for east London, creating opportunities for local people and driving innovation and growth in London and the UK.
On the other hand, Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) is a Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC)established to develop the old oak opportunity area which includes Park Royal industrial estate, the Old Oak development area around the new High Speed 2 Old Oak Common Station and protected land at Wormwood Scrubs. The Corporation works with residents, businesses and partners to shape and accelerate the full regeneration potential created by the arrival of High Speed 2's Old Oak Common super hub and other initiatives to make the Old Oak and Park Royal to become a thriving, inclusive and healthy urban district.
Much of the work carried out by the LLDC involves developing areas through construction, which gives diverse opportunities to embed sustainability initiates through employment, placements opportunities, tackling modern slavery and driving sustainable innovation. A recent and major project case study is the East Bank Stratford Waterfront site. Mace, the project management partner for Stratford Waterfront, is tackling modern slavery using online platform Sedex to assess suppliers for risk. Sedex uses pre-screened data of country and sector risks plus supplier-specific information to highlight potential issues. Mace also has access to audits from Clearview, a global social compliance certification scheme for labour providers, which are risk-assessed via the Sedex platform. This enables a more targeted approach to undertaking audits, highlighting the areas where potential risks may lie.
The LLDC includes standard clauses in above-threshold contracts that oblige contractors to comply with the Modern Slavery Act and with a certified ethical labour scheme. The LLDC also undertakes an annual audit of employers on the park in relation to the London Living Wage, which includes questions about business compliance with the Modern Slavery Act and related due diligence with their supply chains.
In 2022, TfL, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and the London Fire Brigade (LFB), joined the Electronics Watch Low-emission Vehicle programme to facilitate better supply chain transparency and improved working conditions in the supply chain of electric vehicle batteries. The programme, which includes participants from nine other European cities, expands the successful Electronics Watch model of worker driven monitoring into the automotive sector. The three-year programme will enable Electronics Watch to collaborate with vehicle manufacturers to monitor battery production sites and mining operation, working towards greater transparency in fleets owned and operated by TfL, LFB and MPS.
The GLA group with its commitment to the London Anchor's institution which is committed to responsible procurement and using its procurement power to support small and diverse businesses.
Transport for London has been able to leverage on the Government procurement policy note (PPN) 11/20 which allows the public sector buying organisations to reserve below threshold contracts for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 250 employees and either an annual turnover below £45m or a total balance sheet of £40m.
This has led to Transport for London identifying four lower value and lower risk contract from it London teams and DLR business area and two of those contracts have now been awarded with a cumulative of £118,000 of contracts going to SME suppliers with another two contracts worth £350,000 in the pipeline.
For further information on the activities of GLA visit their website:
or email procurement@iclei.org