London’s leaders pledge their ongoing commitment to the the London Anchor Institutions’ Network (LAIN)
Today (19 November 2024) leaders from LAIN’s member organisations reaffirmed their commitment to working in collaboration to address the city’s long-rooted inequalities and accelerating climate emergency, by working together to achieve more, quicker.
Howard Dawber, Deputy Mayor for Business and Growth, highlighted the importance of LAIN to the Mayor and London’s Growth Plan, calling upon London's senior leadership in the room to realise the potential of what London’s anchor organisations can achieve when everyone pulls in the same direction.
“This is a new era for London, with Sadiq Khan’s historical win of a third term and a Labour government with a five-year mandate”, he said.
“What LAIN achieved during the recovery from the pandemic is impressive. We’ve surpassed targets to enter into contracts with MSMES valued at £2.72bn, each year we support 4000 apprenticeships and we’ve trained up 7000 staff in carbon literacy and environmental sustainability. But I feel that we have only touched the surface of what we can do if we pool our considerable resources on issues from skills and training, to climate change, and opportunities for local business. LAIN has a huge role to play in what happens next”.
As an anchor network, LAIN is one of many in a growing movement. From domestic examples in Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester to international parallels in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Cleveland - globally anchor partnerships are on the rise.
London’s anchor organisations, have agreed to use their organisational scale to provide good jobs, buy more from small and diverse businesses and decarbonise their operations and estates.
In just three years since the Network formed, members have achieved great things notably;
The pledge by members to spend up to 30% of their annual procurement budgets is an enormous boost for local jobs, firms and supply chain.
Member organisations are hiring more Londoners from underrepresented backgrounds to close gender, ethnicity and pay gaps.
Members are helping young Londoners to flourish by opening up access to high quality mentoring and sharing expertise with the youth sector.
And LAIN is committed to tackling the net-zero challenge together- putting strategies in place to decarbonise our operations and estates and delivering large-scale retrofit and infrastructure projects.
Wendy Thomson, Co-Chair of LAIN and Vice Chancellor of University of London added: “LAIN is a peer-driven and practical approach that fosters joint problem solving and a collective exploration of how we each, as anchor institutions, can do better.
“We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time, but we know we can achieve so much more by working together. Through LAIN we learn, share, and pull each other forward to create a fairer, greener, more prosperous London. That's a mission we can all get behind.”
Martin Machray, Co-Chair of LAIN and Executive Director of Performance – NHS England (London) described his pride in what LAIN has achieved in a short time: “As individual organisations we are making stretching commitments, but also by working together we are going further and faster than we could alone”.