Government Office for London Annual Review 2001-2002 | Download the Complete Review in PDF Format here

Working to Make London a Better Place

Liz Meek, Regional Director, Government Office for London This is my first annual review as Regional Director and it's been an incredibly busy, challenging and exciting 12 months for me and all at GOL. Over the year I feel we have sharpened our focus and our efforts on delivery against the Government's key targets. We have made significant steps towards building up a greater understanding of the issues London faces and in using this intelligence to influence policy developments in our seven sponsor departments. Better intelligence has also helped us target our activities, particularly the programmes and initiatives we help deliver from GOL

Some of GOL's achievements from last year are:

• Creating some new cross-cutting teams to tackle some especially important and difficult issues for London (and in some cases nationally) - these include:

• The youth and crime unit which has provided hands on expert advice and guidance to those London boroughs facing the most difficult challenges on youth crime. On a pan London basis, we led work to support the London Youth Crime Task Force (chaired by John Denham) which brings together all key agencies to identify what needs to change to get better results on youth crime

• The Affordable Housing Unit which has developed policy on ways of expanding development opportunity, making better use of existing housing and commercial stock, managing demand and finding funding for affordable housing. This unit has now been absorbed into the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

• The Bed & Breakfast unit worked with local authorities, registered social landlords, the voluntary sector and others to disseminate existing good practice and to help pilot new ideas and identifying ways of overcoming any barriers to successfully reducing the use of B&B, particularly in London. This unit has also now joined the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

• The Teacher Recruitment and Retention unit co-ordinated action across London local education authorities to tackle teacher shortages, notably on affordable housing, travel assistance and developing pan London arrangements for overseas recruitment of teachers and use of supply teachers.

• The London Resilience Unit, in the wake of the 11 September events, examined the preparedness of key London organisations for a catastrophic incident and started putting in place a new structure to drive and oversee emergency planning in the Capital.

• Delivering the new building for the Greater London Authority on time and within budget. Nick Raynsford, Minister for London, said "The project is an excellent example of the public and private sectors working together to produce outstanding value for money for the taxpayer."

• Supporting Local Strategic Partnerships in the 20 Neighbourhood Renewal Fund authorities who have all made big strides forward in developing their structures and ways of involving partners and their communities and are now well placed to deliver their strategies.

• Continuing support of the 10 New Deal for Communities Partnerships, where increasing engagement of local residents, greater commitment from public service partners, together with on-going refinement of their delivery plans, means real improvements in quality of life for local residents

• Managing the delivery of the hugely expanded Crime Reduction programme and challenging and helping build the capacity of the borough Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships who now all have clear strategies and targets in place.

• Contracting with 167 community, voluntary, local authority, educational and private sector organisations to deliver UK online - Internet and e-mail accessibility and further ICT training in the majority of London's deprived areas. Working in partnership with the New Opportunities Fund, the ground was laid for up to 390 operational centres by December 2002.

• Introducing the new Connexions service in London, supporting two Partnerships to go live in April and working with three others to go live in 2002/3. By September 2002 all young people in London will have access to a differentiated and integrated support service providing advice, guidance and access to personal development opportunities to help them make a smooth transition to adulthood and working life.

Last year many of the roles and functions we perform on behalf of our sponsor departments changed. There was a major expansion of our work on crime reduction and neighbourhood renewal. And on business and skills we shifted away from managing grant programmes and contracts towards a more influencing and enabling role with social inclusion as a key theme. These changes presented us with a good opportunity to look at whether our structure and ways of working were right to enable us to work best for London.

We concluded that we should create three geographical teams to make it easier to make better connections between policies and programmes covering housing, local government, neighbourhood renewal, skills, education, children and crime reduction within each patch. It's still early days, but we are convinced this move was right and is already helping us to work more effectively with London partners.

This rest of this review offers a small taster of the wide range of very different things that we have been involved with or have helped make happen over the year.

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